Creativity and generosity are two words thrown around a lot without sometimes a real definition of what they really mean. A point i would like to talk about today that Shirky mentioned is about the difference between a professional and a amateur in editing and producing on the internet. Shirky is not arguing whether or not the amateur should be aloud to do it but whether the credibility is there for him or her to do it. Any website ending with “edu” we can proclaim to be legit because we know our source and have respect for it. When you see the “edu” you automatically think of a college or school in general and the professionalism they must show and obey by in terms of internet posting and editing. Our mind immediately tells us this is a reliable source and has validity. Now there also are many websites where sometimes you have to question whether the information is right and if the source who wrote it has credibility to actually write it. For instance, there is a reason many professors tell us not to use wikipedia as a source. It is OK to use it to gather information but to actually cite it might not be. You might not even know who your citing. Wikipedia is made up of multiple users editing so due to that the credibility is lost and it becomes “amateur”.
Shirky says people post things for the public because of two types of motivations, intrinsic and extrinsic. I believe that most people post or do things for intrinsic reasons more so than extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is when you want to do something. Extrinsic motivation is when somebody else tries to make you do something. Most people do not have extrinsic motivation. To be honest, people may consider this blogging assignment extrinsic because we are being told to do it. But for most cases, intrinsic motivation is usually the case. We post about different things because we want people to read it or people to have there view on it. If we really didn’t want to do it and didn’t want people to view it, we would not use the internet.
