Active vs passive: Future prospects

I finally got a chance to listen to Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 Expo speech entitled “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus”. Henriette Weber of ToothlessTiger was kind enough to forward a podcast version of the interesting piece to me.

In the piece Clay’s basic argument is that the advent of the web is a fundamental change comparable to the industrial revolution, which allows people to be active contributors rather than passive consumers. As a result consumption will be less, as people will contribute in more meaningful ways. But will they?

I agree with Clay that the shift is fundamental. To say that the power of participation has been unleashed would be an understatement. And this is going to have an effect on passive consumption. However, there will still be times when we just want to consume and not participate. In fact it will continue to be a significant part.

Why? Because the abundance of choice and options for participation is overvwhelming us. It’s just so much easier to just lean back and consume compared to finding out where to contribute and what to contribute to.

Basically I think that for the next few years, we will see a pattern, where passive consumption will play a massive part UNTIL we come up with applications that makes participation and personal value creation through participation really easy and useful. The majority of participatory applications on the web are still to hard to use for normalt human beings, and the instant gratification pay-off is insignificant compared to really taking focus away from just consuming.

Today for most people the value proposition of being active versus being passive is still to small. But my bet is that that will change. And when it does, people looking towards fueling ordinary passive consumption will have an increasingly hard time.