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.
Comments
Chris Taylor - October 19, 2005 10:57 am
Something else to keep in mind is the relative economic costs of electronic storage as a deterrent to higher-quality audio samples. Back in 1995 a 20GB drive was considered huge, and the vast majority of MP3s were sampled at less than 128bits/sec -- which was the high-water mark at the time.
Today, 20GB is consiered barely adequate (you can buy 120GB or more for what a 20GB drive cost back then), and 128bit MP3s are low-end in terms of audio quality. Today, adequate-sounding MP3s are sampled at 192bits, while the audiophile aims at fuller 320bit or VBR (variable bit rate) sound quality. This is still lower than audio CDs (which clock in at about 127KB/sec in terms of sample rate), but a lot more convenient to carry around with you.
With the advent of iTunes and the multitude of me-too online audio retailers, so on, it's not even hard to get top-notch sound files at entirely reasonable prices.
Chris Taylor - October 19, 2005 11:08 am
Forgot to mention, the big hilariousness for me is the need to quantify, package and market the shift from Web as destination to Web as omnipresent platform/resource.
Heck I can listen to Kingston, Harvard, or Manitoulin Island radio live on my Treo, over the net, without ever slapping eyeballs on a web page. We need a conference, standards and a whack of punditry to tell us this is so, and it presents a whole new paradigm shift and way of doing business? Business is already way out front on this, the guys lagging are the tech-punditry.
Cyn - October 19, 2005 11:08 am
I started to comment on your first post about the article, then abandoned it because I started sounding like an 'amateur'. And god forbid if any of us thought we might fall into that category! Ego aside,(and let's face it, ego-feeding is at the core of Web 2.0. blogging, wikis, opens source bragging rights) I am out of the closet when it comes to heralding the world wide web. Perhaps I'm just an ego-stroker, but I find it hard to deny the ease of participation that hold no boundaries. That's just empowering.
I agree wikipedia is trés full of much crap and poorly written entries (like this sentence), but like anything we search for on the web, if we lose sight of the fact that we are only searching in and amongst ourselves, then we have put too much weight on the professionalism and accuracy of its content.
The web IS, is what the web DOES. I thought Nicholas Carr's article was insightful and unearthing, but I also think many commentators like him, love to hear themselves go on about how they think we're all missing the boat by thwacking away at our little laptops sharing our insights with such loopish, flaw-filled social software. Back to the ego thing. I've never in my semi-lesbo, street-hockey/playing with the boys days, ever witnessed so much, "mine's bigger than yours", as I have since web forums and blogging became ways to spread the peacock feathers.
Not to take away from my heralding here, because I really am a fan of this medium, but as mauch as it has changed my life for the better, it has also provided me with great entertainment. Maybe that's why I don't watch TV anymore. I've got all I can take.
Alan - October 19, 2005 11:17 am
Cyn: what has it taken from you? There is no medium which does not detract but the web convinces us it does not. For me, it has taken away and diluted authoritative knowledge. I waste masses of time to find a fact now because there are so many versions. It makes us "mouse potatoes" as well. It has also subjected me to the stupidities of the new A-list smart people that are clearly a lot dumber thatn the old A-list smart people.<p>I am obviously a fan as well of bits of it but not others. Oddly, that in itself is heresey and against the Borg-will.
Cyn - October 19, 2005 11:42 am
I agree with you Alan. 'Diluted authoritative knowledge', that's it in a nutshell. But if we're to learn from anything, it would be to save our valuable time by paying attention to where the shit lies, and not going back.
In my world of spewing out opinion via the radio, I can't claim fact to anything unless I have it properly backed up. The last place I would go is an untrusted site. I will, however, click on CBC or The Globe and Mail.
I don't see it much different than TV. There's a ton of crappy shows mixed in with a few smart and creative shows. We really only need 2 or 3 channels.
I'm curious... who are the dumber 'new A-list smart people'?
Alan - October 19, 2005 11:47 am
Ummm...the columnists of <i>Wired</i>, anyone who calls him or herself an A-list blogger and futurist consulants for a start. These are the people we apparently have accepted in exchange for, say, scientists and professional journalists as well as others. You know, it is very analogous in the secular world to the shift from traditional protestantism to fundamentalist protestantism that happened in the 1980s and 1990s. Enthusiam alone, that foul motivator and debaser, is all.