Cult of Amateurs - Anti Web2.0 view

Most of enterprises these days are trying to get onto web2.0 bandwagon by launching AJAX sites, aggregators and blogs. No doubt, Web2.0 is about tools which have enabled individuals and communities to harness power of internet in newer ways, but web2.0 also has undeniable social ,cultural and political implications which are yet to be fully understood, especially by enterprises which are by nature hierarchical and control centric. Authors of Wikinomics seems to suggest , in web2.0 era, the emergence of a new kind of enterprise, more open, bottomed up, less hierarchal...an enterprise 2.0. All other institutions humanity has created would also get suffixed and versioned in newer world order of unprecedented democracy, freedom of speech and social participation. So we would have Government2.0, Education 2.0 and many others. "Wisdom of crowds" would rule and some sort of utopia of digital socialism would be achieved. The whole impact on our society would be huge and path altering.

The pace of technological changes and its impact on our society is so rapid that it is like churning of water. Residuals will only get settled once churning stabilizes. But for now, the churning is very engaging and exciting. We mostly read and hear people who have all good things to say about how web2.0, new digital media is leading us to a changed world order, kind of utopia, so it was refreshing in a provocative sense to read some contrarian views in “The Cult of Amateur" by Andrew Keen, who is some sort of contrarian of new digital media, internet and web2.0. Though I would disagree with many of his diatribes against web2.0 and internet, there are nonetheless some hard questions he raises through various arguments especially on mainstream journalism vs bloggers posing as reporters debate and on amateur versus professional content debates. He points put that "cut and paste" online culture would demolish all IP rights and rob many content owners from thier legitimate earnings form content they owned. Then he says that internet is becoming like an ocean of shrill opinions and truth is the vicitim. "In this era of exploding media, there is no truth except the truth you create for yourslef" . The information business he says " is being changed into sheer noise of hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselevs". Sample some of his "opinions" assembled in some kind of "anti-web2.0 manifesto"

Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long Tail”. It is a Hayekian cottage market of small media producers industriously trading with one another. But Anderson’s “Long Tail” is really a long tale. The real economic future is something akin to Google a vertiginous media world in which content and advertising become so indistinguishable that they become one and the same (moregrist to that frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).

The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite (“truth makers”) of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless

(I particularly like this one ->) There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity of online community,individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of all, it’s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that lends the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau

I can see where Andrew keen is coming from on most of his opinions. I agree that wisdom of crowds as espoused by many web2.0 evangelists would be contestable if we take a peek in human history. Crowds have hardly been wiser in thier choices than a lone individual could be. Traditional news media has become stale and parody, but most of citizen journalism has also been about lifting content from traditional sources and aggregating it. But largely, most of points which Andrew keen raises in his book are contestable and some are plainly elitist. Digital Utopians might sound similar to what Marx said about socialism but a fundamental difference between a collective farming and web2.0 digital communities is that later are by choice whereas former were by dictates. On the whole, it is a must read book to get different perspective on web2.0 revolution.