I’ve heard him on NPR, I’ve listened to him at DLD, and now I can’t wait to get my hands on Clay Shirky’s new book “Here Comes Everybody”. The following excerpt - which I took from a blog of Shirky’s publishers - might not be in the book, but it sums up some of the most common misconceptions about User-Generated-Content in a very elegant way:

“A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation.”

“Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a community setting, and a community isn’t just a small audience; it has a social density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An audience isn’t just a big community either; it’s more anonymous, with many fewer ties between users.”

“As a result, some tools support both publication and conversation. Weblogs aren’t only like newspapers and they aren’t only like coffeeshops and they aren’t only like diaries — their meaning changes depending on how they are used, running the gamut from reaching the world to gossiping with your friends.”

If (nearly) all borders between trading information publicly and establishing a social life will fall – is that a good thing? I hope I can find the answer in his new book, otherwise I will be a lot less excited about the opportunities the internet opens up to society.