Unlearning the past to understand the future

I'm not happy with that headline, but I wanted to summarize the key points in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and particularly his conclusion that:

The future belongs to those who take the present for granted.

Shirky (who is 7 years younger than I am, by the way) says that older people's real-world experience is usually an advantage. Younger people, he says, "overestimate mere fads" and "make this kind of error a thousand times before they learn better." But in revolutionary times (such as after the invention of the printing press or, say, right now), experienced people make the opposite mistake.

"When a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad." He recounts how grown-ups debated whether to allow high school students to use calculators in class when he was young. "The unspoken worry [of the grown-ups] was that, since calculators had appeared so suddenly, they might disappear just as suddenly. What none of [them] understood is that there would never again be a day when we needed to divide two seven-digit numbers on paper."

"I'm old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that music comes from stores. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. " Shirky says he has had to unlearn these things and many others, "because those things have stopped being true."

When I started the Los Gatos Observer, I was competing with the traditional local paper, the Los Gatos Weekly Times, which was delivered every Tuesday. I posted articles 24/7 and my competitor missed the "news" by ten days or more (until they made an effort to hold the presses for Friday news). I worked hard to make my site fresh and we posted new articles at all hours. But I was constantly asked, "When does it come out?"

I don't blame people for not rushing to change how they think of things, but when you focus on a particular aspect of it, such as how we, as citizens, are informed about incidents and events in our community, the obviousness of the future that the recent revolution in communications has wrought seems impossible to miss. "The newspaper is dying," people say, reading an article about it in the newspaper. "Too bad. I like my morning newspaper."

There's nothing like riding a horse, or camping under the stars, or a number of other things that progress has taken from daily life.

The question to ask, of course, is "How can I best stay informed about my community?" I think the answer is a local, community editor and contributing neighbors who compile and categorize items (articles, photos, videos) that might be of interest.

The next question, "What is the best way to communicate these items to everyone in town?" has an obvious answer. Who in their right mind would suggest printing thousands of copies of the items on literally tons of paper, then hiring people to deposit them on every doorstep? A bundle of newspapers on the curb waiting to be distributed may evoke nostalgia, but it also represents a significant and needless environmental impact from depleted forests to burgeoning landfills.

You could e-mail these news items to everyone, or text them, but "push" media--you watch when I say you can watch--is being replaced by "pull"--opt-in marketing, TiVo, and so on. Better to post the news items on a web site and let subscribers visit when they want. Obvious, but not to some of my neighbors.

"I now spend more energy on weeding than planting," Clay Shirky writes. "Which is to say, more energy trying to forget the irrelevant than learning about the new."