The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact. (p. 81)

• What kinds of filtering are required when effectively utilizing the Internet and why?
• How can we best teach students to filter?
• How is filtering an “increasingly social” phenomenon and how is that good and/or bad?
  

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution. (p. 107)

• In what ways are our social tools a challenge to modern society?
• In what ways are we currently experiencing a revolution?

Reference:

• Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody. New York: The Penguin Press.
  

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