Clay Shirky-The Man has a Point

Clay Shirky, considered more as a man with a utopian spirit of the Internet, seeks to refute cypterdystopian views such as those of Nicholas Carr and Mark Bauerlien through his analysis, "Does the Internet Make You Smarter?"

He makes a clear clarification of the surmised assumptions concerning the future generation and the way they will employ the Web, being that we in fact will utterly fail handling such digital freedom. 

Shirky discusses an honest perspective that deserves recognition.  This common, incorrect assumption lies on 3 false myths:

1. That historic generations have witnessed nothing but intellectual attainment.
2. That present generations only create and act silly online.
3. That future generations will fail as intellectuals to produce cultural norms for the Internet.

I find all of them to be coldly blunt, and I love it, though the first myth he refutes I find my favorite.

Spirky states,

". . . [T]he rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture."

This quote first signifies the constant reiterating conversations in which those maybe barely or maybe much older than my age misjudge our generation as immature, unsure of our ability to be as dedicated and accomplished as those historically; however, it also then signifies that with these conversations comes a lot of hypocrisy. 

And the man has a point.  As much success this world has witnessed in the past, the world has witnessed just as much, equal, maybe greater amount of failure. 

Though the point is not to demean any previous generations before mine, in fact that is the complete opposite of the point.

The point is to bring attention to how many amazing people of my life are or have lived in my or other's lives in order to make clear that living and learning through the people of past generations, such as my parents, grandparents, teachers, mentors, has lead me to hold the belief that if they can be the people they have become, encountering all of the failure and defeat America's seen, then why can't we?

It's all relational-we all fail the same amount, just in a different manner.

We may have failed differently than others in the past, but that only means we will discover different mediums for overcoming just as those intellectuals cyperdystopians speak so strongly.