Clay Shirky at Pop! Tech 2008 (Creative Commons License via Pop!Tech)

I’m currently rereading Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky, a must-read for any journalist who wants to remain employable/understand what the hell is happening to our profession. The book chronicles how Web 2.0 technologies are revolutionizing our world and the way we socialize with one another via these technologies. Flipping through the pages, pen in hand, it’s hard not to have an “ah-ha” moment with every sentence. Shirky gets it; why can’t the rest of us?

With this last read-through, Shirky struck me the most by comparing today’s journalists to the scribes of the early 1400s. Back in the day scribes did something that was rare; they wrote. They were the keepers of our society’s memories. “The scribe was the only bulwark against great intellectual loss.” Yet the invention of moveable type in the late 1400s made scribes nearly obsolete over time. The ability to write was no longer rare.

This comparison isn’t shocking. In fact, many other professionals have alluded to similar analogies in the past. What I find interesting and somewhat comical about Shirky’s comparison though, was his reference to Johannes Trithemius, the Abbott of Sponheim and defender of the scribe. In 1492, the Abbott published a book entitled De Laude Scriptorum, which outlined the benefits of the scribal tradition.

The Abbot’s position would have been mere reactionary cant (”We must preserve the old order at any cost”) but for one detail. If, in the year 1492, you’d written a treatise you wanted widely disseminated, what would you do? You’d have it printed, of course, which was exactly what the Abbot did…. The content of the Abbot’s book praised the scribes, while its printed form damned them; the medium undermined the message.

This example is both funny and sad because the mentality/fear behind it still holds true today. Although the example I’m about to describe doesn’t fit Shirky’s example exactly, it does call to mind a certain mentality among some journalists. On April 21, 2009, New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd poked a little fun at Twitter. The article was centered around her quest to find out “if the inventors of Twitter were as annoying as their invention.” Dowd asked the company’s founders to limit their answers to 140 characters, and questions ranged from “Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?” to “Why did you call the company Twitter instead of Clutter?”

Dowd’s opinion and the Abbot’s are similar in the fact that they both used technology to express their hatred for technology to end users. Ok, so Dowd didn’t use Twitter, but the story was posted online, which is the technological platform that allows Twitter to exist at all. She also poked fun of bloggers who bash the micro-blogging site by stating, “Isn’t that a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?” This comment proves that not only is Dowd afraid of Twitter, she’s afraid of all technological change that disrupts the status quo.

But this story isn’t about Dowd. Her comments have long passed. But it’s just a matter of time before another journalist replaces them with their own fearful words. I can think of more than a handful of  journalists who have damned technology while at the same time used it to promote their work. Print snobs claim that the Internet is destroying good journalism. This point is somewhat valid, however, just because something is in print doesn’t make it good journalism (Us Weekly). Good journalism can be done across multiple platforms. And great journalists should be able to recognize this. What print snobs refuse to see is how these new technologies could truly benefit our profession in the end, and dare I say, mankind. We need amateurs to keep us on our toes, because let’s face it, many journalists think their shit is amazing. But listen up shit lovers; no one’s shit’s amazing. We are the new scribes. But we should be acting more like the new printing presses.