Canada 3.0 & The Collapse of Complex Business Models. If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage everyone to go read Clay Shirky’s The Collapse of Complex Business Models. I just read it while finishing up this piece and it articulates much of what underpins it in the usual brilliant Shirky manner. I’ve been reflecting a lot on Canada 3.0 (think SXSWi meets government and big business) since the conference’s end. I want to open by saying there were a number of positive highlights. I came away with renewed respect and confidence in the CRTC. But these moments aside, the more I reflect on the conference the more troubled I feel. But, secondly, even when judged in commercial terms, the conference, in my mind, failed. No, the conference’s main problem was that, at the core of many conversations lay an untested assumption: That we can manage the transition of broadcast media (by this I mean movies, books, newspaper & magazines, television) as well as other industries from an (a) broadcast economy to a (b) networked/digital economy.
Like this: The Collapse of Complex Business Models. I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs? That kind of question comes up a lot. It’s a tough one to answer, not just because the answer is unlikely to make anybody happy, but because the premise is more important than the question itself.
There are two essential bits of background here. Here’s why. In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. The answer he arrived at was that they hadn’t collapsed despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it. The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Dr. Or it might not. TED TALKS that can change the way you think: Clay. Facebook Killed the Private Life. Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. Clay Shirky and Accountability Journalism. NYU Professor Clay Shirky published an essay, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“, that suggested that journalists needed to radically rethink the assumptions that have made market-supported newspapers possible.
It was a bombshell, cited and commented on thousands of times. Today, Clay outlined the arguments of the essay at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School and filled a room with journalists, scholars and others interested in his views. Clay’s focus is the future of “accountability journalism”, the sort of serious investigative journalism that prevents corruption and keeps the powerful in check. He references the reporting done by the Boston Globe to expose abuse by Catholic priests under the leadership of Cardinal Law and his attempts to shuffle and cover for abusive priests. His fear is that the model we’ve had through the 20th century to produce this accountability journalism is irretrievably broken. Third, “the coherence of newspapers is no longer logical.”