Analyse Shirky’s theory of media development and audience transformations!

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose ­collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works.
Clay Shirky's work focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that "a group is its own worst enemy." His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC.
According to Shirky the importance of technology and media products is very important, the internet is the first bit of media that you can have conversations and consume; every medium is next door to every other medium (on the internet). The importance of the internet is that media operators which are everyday people can now be consumers as well as producers for example this can be portrayed through social networking media you can post videos and watch videos however you have the comfort of talking and communicating to friends.
The impact on audiences and transformation of audience is becoming clearer as time goes on and more technology starts to develop that audience is playing a major part in society, the main thing that has changed is that anyone now can be a citizen reporter the government can access news now from normal citizens not the national news broadcasters. The reasons we have this advantage now is because of social media sites where people can be connected all the time and news has the advantage of being spread rapidly. For example the Chinese government found out about the earthquake in their own country via twitter rather than having it reported by news officials, this can be beneficial because pictures and videos can be uploaded and everyone can see the reality into what really happened. This caused people to set up donation sites any money was raised straight away. This fits in with Michael Wesch’s 2.0 theory where he stated the changes in the way we communicate however when there is a new story there is an overload in the information that gets posted which causes no way of filtering the stories being posted, this could lead to big social media sites such as twitter being shut down due to the overload of information being processed.
Clay Shirky  stated  in his speech that there are four periods in the history of media when there was a major change the first being print, then two way communications which was first introduced as text then followed by voice and the third was recorded media which was firstly photos, then sound and music. Lastly the fourth was radio and TV.