The paper is focused on the cultural consequences of a new technological opportunity in mass communication. The Internet has given two billion people a technical means of authorship. It is a real explosion of authors...The paper is focused on the cultural consequences of a new technological opportunity in mass communication. The Internet has given two billion people a technical means of authorship. It is a real explosion of authorship: In all previous history of mankind there, probably, have been about 200-300 million authors. The emancipation of authorship explains (better than technological innovations) all other changes in the public life, connected with the new communicative environment. The new environment, in which any person from the audience can be an author, develops its own mechanism for creating public significance. The paper describes the structure and functioning of this mechanism, named the Viral Editor, as a ubiquitous and dispersed creature of the Internet which consists of people-users who all now have gotten rights to compose, edit and spread any facts and opinions in any form and shape.展开更多
文摘The paper is focused on the cultural consequences of a new technological opportunity in mass communication. The Internet has given two billion people a technical means of authorship. It is a real explosion of authorship: In all previous history of mankind there, probably, have been about 200-300 million authors. The emancipation of authorship explains (better than technological innovations) all other changes in the public life, connected with the new communicative environment. The new environment, in which any person from the audience can be an author, develops its own mechanism for creating public significance. The paper describes the structure and functioning of this mechanism, named the Viral Editor, as a ubiquitous and dispersed creature of the Internet which consists of people-users who all now have gotten rights to compose, edit and spread any facts and opinions in any form and shape.