Shirky 10-11, epilogue

Shirky discusses how the wisdom of crowds can be a negative thing.  He says the more users something requires, the more skeptical people can be.  I feel like this shows in history with open source software how at first many people were skeptical.  I'm sure they thought Linux was a good idea, but doubted that it could ever be successful.  The same is true for wikis like Wikipedia.  I think the success of Linus and Wikipedia has made people much more open to open source software and while I think there are definitely lots of issues with open source software, we use it frequently in DTC 354 and it's really nice not to have to pay for software, especially for creative projects where it's necessary to try out products to decide if it's something you want or not.  Overall the wisdom of crowds is a positive thing, but I thought it was interesting how Shirky mentioned a negative side effect that I had not considered.  People are scared to try new things, and the more people involved the more potential problems will be pointed out.

In the epilogue, Shirky said that news of an earthquake in China spread faster via Twitter than any news source. This points towards the future of news-eventually (and even somewhat now) social media like Twitter will be the go to source for breaking news.  The internet allows people to communicate quickly around the world.  This makes me wonder about news and the constant concern about bias.  Does having the public create news make it more or less biased?  Obviously people experiencing a situation are much more invested in it, but then the wisdom of crowds comes in-isn't a large group of people smarter than one unbiased person?  I think it will be interesting to see where news goes in the future and see what happens with Twitter.  I wonder if they'll make a way for people to be more influential on Twitter, whether, for example, a famous reporter's tweets will be treated more urgently than those of the average user.  I think social media has definitely changed the world for the better and it will be interesting to see how allowing the public to disperse information freely will change news and media in the future.