John Brockman, editor and publisher of Edge Foundation, Inc., posed the following as the question of 2010:
How is the Internet changing the way you think?
There are answers from hundreds of people with varying degrees of involvement in the new media/tech world, including, for example, everyone from Richard Dawkins, Brian Eno and Alan Alda to Howard Rheingold, Sherry Turkle, Chris Anderson and a whimsical (yet totally apt) response by Harvard computational geneticist George Church. The response that gets me going, however, is by Clay Shirky, entitled “The Shock of Inclusion.” I turn to Shirky when I want to read something about the Internet that is clear, pointed and true, which is surprisingly hard to find. He writes:
“If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.”
I don’t know about you, but that gives me the chills.
