![]() The publish button does very little in and of itself, and certainly has not by itself replaced a publishing industry. Without the webserver, without connectivity, and yes, without people actually seeing your work your publish button does nothing except stroke your own ego. The actual public distribution is the key, not the silly button. Let’s try another example: If you have wordpress on your local machine, and you write something and push “publish” was it in fact published? Nope. If you didn’t write a post, and just pushed “publish” you would end up with a blog full of nothing. ![]() The “publish” button isn’t any more significant in the process than any of the other parts. You almost got it Paul, but once again, you are too busy trying to defend Mike to actually think for yourself. ” Now, please tell me why the “publish” button on my WordPress installation isn’t publishing anything, even though my post is published as soon as I press that button. It’s a very different world, but it’s a much better world for creators - and it all comes back to the fact that publishing is no longer a job, but a button.įiled Under: clay shirky, gatekeeper, publishing ![]() The gatekeepers stripped your work from you for a pittance. The enablers help make your work better, but still leave you and the work at the center. Thus, there is no need for gatekeepers, but (once again), it’s all about the enablers. can all be done by lots of organizations, rather than just a few. The difference today is that the gates are gone, the need for help to make something public is gone, and those other things - publicity, improving the product, monetizing, etc. And since there was that gate, the gatekeeper could control everything and demand total ownership over the work. And all of those roles are very important, but the role of making something public was the only one that really had that gate. Of course, there are still plenty of other things - making it better, promoting it, monetizing it, etc. You can make anything public that you want and reach the entire world. The main role that the gatekeepers had was in helping to “make your work public.” But that role isn’t needed any more (nor is there any real gate any more). When you think about it, this really does hit on the key point of disruption for so many of the industries we talk about today. Even if people want a physical artifact - pipe the PDF to a printing machine. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. The question isn’t what happens to publishing - the entire category has been evacuated. There certainly are other important roles, but they’re not “publishing” per se.: Now, of course, publishing as a profession means more than just making public, but that is the root of it, and Shirky is absolutely right that that role is changing completely - and that means that the industries that built themselves up by glorifying their ability to be a gatekeeper in making things public are going to struggle to adapt. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. ![]() In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. Tim Lee points us to a really fantastic (as per usual) discussion with Clay Shirky about media disruption, in which he makes the key point that publishing is no longer a job, but a button: Tue, Apr 10th 2012 08:10am - Mike Masnick ![]()
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