The decline of institutions and the rise of cooperation

The promised decline of print media and professional journalism is heralded by the rise of bloggers. At the push of a button, everybody can be an opinion leader. Alongside the haphazard browsing habits that are the undoing of the media institutions of the past generation, the statistics of bloggers and their readership seem to spell the inevitable doom of authoritative reporting.
But if this pattern is seen to reflect a general decline of institution that are expanded through cooerpative behaviour in the spirit of photo sharing sites or user initiated social support groups, then Clay Shirky sees the emergence of a promising period in social organisation. As a social probelm solving mechanism, cooperation has many advantages over old fashioned instutions. In an ever increasingly complex world, creativity may become more valuable than efficiency, something the old insitutiuonal management metaphors are much less well adapted for.