[iDC] THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO

[Joshua Levy]

I've been reading through a galley copy of Keen's book and I've been struck
by its similarity to Nicholas Lemann's piece in the New Yorker last summer,
in which Lemann worried about the effect of citizen journalism on
professional journalism.  Sure, citizen journalism might provide hyper-local
commentary and help round out coverage, he wrote, but it can never replace
the kind of well-funded investigative journalism that sustains our
democracy, etc.

The problem is, I've never heard any citizen journalist or advocate for
citizen journalism suggest that traditional media should be replaced; Lemann
set up a straw man that he could conveniently use to scare the pros out
there about the blog menace that, with their amateur-hour ramblings and
content-aggregating CMSs, were going to destroy traditional media and
therefore the very foundations of our democracy... it all sounded like the
protestations of someone nervous that his grip on the status quo was
loosening, and he was feeling defensive.   What he failed to mention was
that big media companies were too arrogant to notice that the public was
coming to expect a more transparent approach to reporting, and was coming to
think of itself as a producer rather than a receiver of content, and now
that it was almost too late they were blaming it all on those damn
amateurs.

While I do think that the "web 2.0" is about opening up the process of
making, receiving, sending, remixing, gatekeeping, mashing, etc. to more
people (democratizing the process), like citizen journalism, this isn't
about replacing an old paradigm of trusted sources with a new one of amateur
relativity, it's about (hopefully) correcting a model that represents the
interests of a very elite, wealthy few -- though those elite tend to own the
most popular participatory sites, as Trebor has pointed out, which certainly
complicates things.

In any case, the big media companies won't become extinct because of this;
instead they will have to learn how to coexist in a new environment that
invites a broader conception of culture and art than their market-tested
approach allows.

And while this means that alongside some culturally important stuff we see a
lot of inanity on YouTube, or narcissistic chatter on MySpace, it's not like
inanity and narcissism are hard to find on any television channel...

-Josh

On 4/26/07, sergio basbaum <sbasbaum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks for this Craig. I absolutely agree. All that maniphesto is so
> presumtuous and thinks itself as too important, but is truly naive.
>
> This idea of the web "killing" culture makes no sense. The web is not
> killing culture: it is culture. Contemporary culture, indeed, in which
> new cultural forms are emerging. All this Adorno thing makes no sense
> since a long time ago... If it was for us to take Adorno that far,
> what would we make with all non-European cultural forms like Brazilian
> popular music -- to say the least? Is it a decadence of true high -art
> cultural expressions? It cannot be tought this way.
>
> I`m myself taken for some as a technophobic -- which of course I'm not
> --, and I've been working on a lot of critical insights concerning
> technological culture.  But someone who cannot understand that
> technological culture is contemporary culture has a very narrow vision
> of what the word "culture" means...
>
> best for all
>
> S.
>
> On 4/25/07, Craig Bellamy <txt at craigbellamy.net> wrote:
> > Some of these ideas are silly. What about the telephone; a lot of people
> > talk about insignificant things on the telephone?
> >
> > What is a 'professional' phone conversation and what is a 'amatuer'
> > conversation? If a European intellactual talks to another person on the
> > telephone is this better that my mother talking to her best friend Beth
> > about startegies for growing Tomatoes?
> >
> > An anti Web 2.0 manifesto is intellectually narrow. People will talk to
> > other people about what ever they want to using what ever tools that
> > they have at their disposal. There is nothing new about that.
> >
> > best,
> >
> > Craig
> >
> >
> >
> > ______________________________________________________________________
> > This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
> > For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email
> > ______________________________________________________________________
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (
> distributedcreativity.org)
> > iDC at mailman.thing.net
> > http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
> >
> > List Archive:
> > http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> >
> > iDC Photo Stream:
> > http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (
> distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> http://mailman.thing.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/idc
>
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
>
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
>



-- 
Joshua Levy | 917-609-6523 | AIM: levjoy12
www.personaldemocracy.com | www.techpresident.com | www.levjoy.com

The fourth annual Personal Democracy Forum is happening May 18, 2007 in NYC.
Register now: http://www.personaldemocracy.com/conference/2007
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20070429/233e7388/attachment.html