Easter Research

Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky can be described as a man of many talents. He is an American Writer, consultant and teacher on the Social and Economical effects of internet technologies.The later of these accomplishments is why he is so suited to the Media in the Online Age course. Shirky has been writing and has been getting interviewed about the internet since about 1996 which gives him a vast knowledge of the internet and how it has developed over time. But, Shirky like to focus his knowledge on the networking technologies such as Peer-to-Peer networks and Wireless networks. Shirky is a huge believer of using crowd-sourcing and this can be seen by reading his book, Here Come Everybody. He uses the phrase "The Internet Runs On Love" to describe the nature of how crowd-sourcing works, saying that the internet runs solely on the power of people gathering and sharing their information.
As Shirky is a firm believer that the internet is a huge force that can be used for the greater of everyone  he is one of the Cyber-Utopians that Evgeny Morozov is very sceptical about and because of his feeling about the internet he was also completely against the SOPA and PIPA acts that tried to get written into legislation early 2012 giving talks such as "Why SOPA is Bad" to emphasise this point.

David Gauntlett
David Gauntlett is a British Sociologist and Media Theorist who's work concerned contemporary media audiences but has later shifted his interest into the everyday marketing and sharing of digital media and social media which is once again like Clay Shirky why he is such a great source for the Media in The On-line Age course.  The major thing which David Gauntlett is known for it his use of the Term Web 2.0 which in a nutshell describes how the internet as a whole medium for media is becoming more and more interactive as the days go by. This can be seen as a huge transition from the old web that is now called Web 1.0 in which users of the internet would just consume the information that they were being given without contributing in anyway to it, this has radically changed now with the rise of Wikis, the need for features like commenting on websites allowing users to voice their opinions about certain media articles on the web but most importantly and the biggest the huge rise in Social Media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. These are the sites that have turned the average internet user from a normal consumer to an everyday prosumer, meaning that they not only not only consume the information that is now on the internet but also can contribute and produce their own for the whole web to see.

Example Of Wikinomics
One of the best examples for Wikinomics that I can ever think of for the Media in the Online Age would have to be the Linux OS Distribution. Linus is an operating system that was first created by one person leading a small group of programmers. The first release was then sent as open source and free for the rest of the world to contribute to and has now evolved into thousands upon thousands of programmers contributing code each and everyday working to make the overall project better and better.