>But to be fair -- or, more to the point, make sure the bullets hit all
>guilty parties -- Shriky's relentless wheel re-inventing is a typical
>example of what passes for sagacity within Internet punditry circles.
I don't know. I've been reading Shirky on another email list since 2000 and, IIRC, I was subbed to the email list he fired up as a way to distribute his writings. He's certainly written more complex stuff, although I recall reading the power laws of the internet piece and thinking, dewd there is so much other literature out there, that you don't even have to go with pareto alone, and could actually bring in the more politicized analysis he was trying to bring in. in other words, the poltical dissection of what's going on with the longtail has already been done, and Shirky made it seem as if he'd discovered it in the Interwebz.
>There are exceptions. For example, Bruce Sterling brings a broader
>POV, deeper reading experience and above average familiarity with
>serious works such as _Capital_ to his futurism (and I write this as a
>bloke who really dislikes futurism).
>
>This is what makes his stuff usually more bearable (at at times, even
>insightful;) than most of his colleagues.
>
>Shirky and co., on the other hand, are clever but simply don't know as
>much as they suppose.
>
>
>Come to think of it, there's probably a nifty bit of analysis waiting
>to be uncovered here (and actually, I think you're doing it on the fly
>shag): that is, how the social relations of the Internet elite class
>produce inescapably middlebrow intellectual output.
i'm not sure it's middle brow. It may just be that he's trying to write for a popular audience? That he reckons that his biggest readers are going to be business-types -- and I suspect so since B&N and Borders both categorize it as a business tech type of book.