Rereading that essay David sent and it strikes me as quite funny that Web 2.0 is not being called Bubble 2.0 as there seems to be a lot of repetition of mistakes – but as long as there are consultants and cash that is going to happen.
What is most interesting is how basic assumptions are so empty yet that is what you get for futurism. Nicholas Carr, the author of the essay, makes an obvious but excellent point about the quality of content and the web. It reminded me of when I first was listening to Mp3s with the lads in the day, I kept asking why the quality of the audio was so bad and got such insightful responses as “whatever” or some such thing. It appeared that somewhere around 1996 the focus on listening to music that had the highest performance fidelity got dropped as a mass culture interest in favour of music that cost you nothing but the 50 bucks a month for internet and, then, 4000 bucks for the computer. What I see Carr as saying is that understanding itself is going that same way – it does not matter that the facts are crap as long as they come out of the screen that lets me post words on it. He writes:
The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call “the mainstream media.” Here’s O’Reilly: “While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls ‘we, the media,’ a world in which ‘the former audience,’ not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.”
It has been a long time since I picked up Wired as reading it always got me mad at these sorts of stunned ideas that were presented in it but it appears that there may be an ascendency of a new techo-doltery that has formed around this notion of Web 2.0 – and where better to link that from but wikipedia.
Is it dangerous? Maybe. At the heart of the keener interest in the web is a satisfaction with just the appearance of authority or perhaps the shrugging off of authority in favour of entertainment – without consideration for what is lost…because the Internet Archive does not record what pre-dates itself. So we no longer like the tough love of The New York Times or anything to which the label of the mainstream media attaches in favour of nice stories we like. Like a child eating candy instead of finishing her vegetables. But it means we also like crappier sounding audio, fewer specialist thinkers and not paying artists for their works – not to mention providing a communications medium for terrorists that is practically impossible to monitor.
Maybe the Internet itself is that grey goo seeping over the horizon that Bill Joy spoke of in “Why the Future Does Not Need Us” five and a half years ago.