My friend Paul A. Barsch shared an interesting article with me from which I want to pick a few points to share with you. The article from the Wall Street Journal is called The Good, the Bad, And the Web 2.0. Here's the backdrop:
The Wall Street Journal's Jamin Brophy-Warren invited Andrew Keen, the author of The Cult of the
Amateur, and David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, to debate the pros and cons of Web 2.0. by email. I have chosen a few paragraphs reflecting each author's perspective in their own words.
Andrew Keen:
"So what, exactly, is Web 2.0? It is the radical democratization of media which is enabling anyone to publish anything on the Internet. Mainstream media's traditional audience has become Web 2.0's empowered author. Web 2.0 transforms all of us -- from 90-year-old grandmothers to eight-year-old third graders -- into digital writers, music artists, movie makers and journalists. Web 2.0 is YouTube, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook. Web 2.0 is YOU! (Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2006)."
"Yes, the people have finally spoken. And spoken. And spoken.
"Now they won't shut up. The problem is that YOU! have forgotten how to listen, how to read, how to watch. Thus, the meteoric rise of Web 2.0's free citizen media is mirrored by the equally steep decline in paid mainstream media and the mass redundancies amongst journalists, editors, recording engineers, cameramen and talent agents. Newspapers and the music business are in structural crisis, Hollywood and the publishing business aren't far behind. We've lost truth and interest in the objectivity of mainstream media because of our self-infatuation with the subjectivity of our own messages. It's what, in "Cult of the Amateur," I call digital narcissism. A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that the essential epistemological anchor of truth. The impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert is replaced by murkiness of the anonymous amateur. When everyone claims to be an author, there can be no art, no reliable information, no audience.
"Everything becomes miscellaneous. And miscellany is a euphemism for anarchy."
"The issue of talent is the heart of the matter. How do we traditionally constitute/nurture/sell talent and how is Web 2.0 altering this? My biggest concern with Web 2.0 is the critique of mainstream media that, implicitly or otherwise, drives its agenda. It's the idea that mainstream media is a racket run by gatekeepers protecting the interests of a small, privileged group of people. Thus, by flattening media, by doing away with the gatekeepers, Web 2.0 is righting cultural injustice and offering people like your friends Joe and Maria an opportunity to monetize their talent. But the problem is that gatekeepers -- the agents, editors, recording engineers -- these are the very engineers of talent. Web 2.0's distintermediated media unstitches the ecosystem that has historically nurtured talent. Web 2.0 misunderstands and romanticizes talent. It's not about the individual -- it's about the media ecosystem. Writers are only as good as their agents and editors. Movie directors are only as good as their studios and producers."
David Weinberger:
"When I say the Web is us, I don't mean that it's an aggregation of individuals -- a herd of screeching monkeys or a scurry of voiceless cockroaches running from the light. We're connected, primarily through talk in which we show one another what we find interesting in the world. That's essential to the Web. The Web is only a web because we're building links that say "Here's something worth your time, and here's why." It's a little act of selflessness in which a person who has our attention directs it elsewhere.
"There is therefore hope here that in the midst of the ever-present low culture, we will together educate our tastes, seeing more of the world than the traditional media could ever show us, and learn to appreciate it. Included in this hope is, of course, the fact that the traditional gatekeepers are themselves online, telling us what is worth attending to and why. Now their influence depends on how convincing and articulate they are, not on their control over the on-off switch on the broadcast tower or printing press. That is, the gate keeping goes from dictating what we can read to telling us what we ought to read."
"(1) Some amateurs are uncredentialed experts from whom we can learn.
(2) Amateurs often bring points of view to the table that the orthodoxy has missed, sometimes even challenging the authority of institutions whose belief systems have been corrupted by power.
(3) Professional and expert ideas are often refined by being brought into conversation with amateurs.
(4) There can be value in amateur work despite its lack of professionalism: A local blogger's description of a news story happening around her may lack grammar but provide facts and feelings that add to -- or reveal -- the truth.
(5) The rise of amateurism creates a new ecology in which personal relationships can add value to the experience: That a sister-in-law is singing in the local chorus may make the performance thoroughly enjoyable, and that I've gotten to know a blogger through her blog makes her posts more meaningful to me.
(6) Collections of amateurs can do things that professionals cannot. Jay Rosen, for example, has amateur citizens out gathering distributed data beyond the scope of any professional news organization.
(7) Amateur work helps us get over the alienation built into the mainstream media. The mainstream is theirs. The Web is ours.
(8) That amateur work is refreshingly human -- flawed and fallible -- can inspire us, and not just seduce us into braying like chimps."
These are but snippets of the conversation. But I ask YOU, the Time Person of the Year, what you think because you are Web. 2.0. Are we a group of amateurs creating low-culture and a state of bad information where we produce an environment that "misunderstands and romanticizes talent" and worse, where their is no hierarchically trained talent to weed out the crap? Or are we creating a place that is "refreshingly human -- flawed and fallible -- (that) can inspire us?" Is Web 2.0 good or bad?
As you can see on the left, TypePad has been promoting the ShareThis Widget. Seemed like an excellent way to help readers share the posts here, if they wished. Unfortunately, downloading the Widget caused more grief for my readers than usability.
of people are best-suited to blogging. These are my opinions based on lots of reading, listening and observing, not truths backed by data and research. Here are my conclusions:
time. Lots of it! It takes creativity, more than most of us can spare. It takes innovation, more than many of us have. It takes thinking, and that just plain hurts.