Some thoughts:
Through the lens of social media, Shirky illustrates McLuhan’s initial proposition that the message of a given technology is the resulting change in human relationships over space and time (the psychic and social consequences). However, he points to ‘professional narcissism’ as the reason for newspapers’ obliviousness to the effect of social media. I’d argue that it’s not a question of professional bias as to why traditional publishing misjudged the role of social media and amateur publishing, but rather an inability for anyone to foresee something that does not yet exist. Hindsight is valuable precisely because we can look at a time and space we are no longer in. Sidenote: he omits architects as professionals, but I’d agree they are most representative of this quotation: “[a professional] pays as much or more attention to the judgment of her peers as to the judgment of her customers when figuring out how to do her job.” (Bolding mine, recovering from architecture for ever.)
I also found the briefly touched on question of physicality to interesting. Shirky writes, “Digital means of distributing words and images have robbed newspapers of the coherence they formerly had, revealing the physical object of the newspaper as a merely provisional solution; now every article is its own section.” Thinking back again to McLuhan who argued that the typographic cultural bias equated linearity with rationality, perhaps this also is reflect in the newspaper’s inability to forecast the impact of social media.