Good arguments, just so rude....

Chapter I The Great Seduction

An interesting book. Easy to read.

The author started with his experience of attending a camping trip about Web 2.0 in Silicon Valley. As a pioneer of Internet , he dreamed of making people accessing Bob Dylan or Bach everywhere with mobile devices, like making the world a more musical place. However, the camping trip disppointed him.

The topic of the camp was democratization. Media, information, knowledge, content, audience, author – all are going to be democratized by Web 2.0. Web 2.0 makes it possible that every ordinary people becomes a noble amateur, who “contributes” to the world, instead of using technology to bring more culture to the masses. Audience and author have become one, and culture is transformed into cacophony.

Apparently, the author is not a big fan of Web 2.0. He thinks democratization is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent. It is threatening the future of cultural insitutions.

The author is a pundit, a so called expert. Maybe that’s why he looks down upon the amateurs. For me I think there are two kinds of cultures. The newspapers, classic music, they are produced for those well educated people, those experts. But the characteristics of Internet makes it a platform to encourage interaction and participation. Both of them are cultures. Even those who have never been educated may have some special talents. How can we say a work made by amateurs are not arts. The criteria is not who makes it but what it is. Even Impressionism, it didn’t be accepted in the early age. But that’s also sort of creativity, right?

And then the author argues that Web 2.0 revolution only creates unreliable news and a chaos of useless information, and even makes the truth disappear. This undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse, encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and stifling creativity. Well of course for amateurs we cannot believe every word they say. But can we also believe the experts, the authorities? Too many examples of the nonsense by so called authorities. Consumers are more likely to believe the online reviews by other consumers rather than advertising or other official information by the company. Why? Because the amateurs, the ordinary people like you and me, they are more honest and more authentic if they have the resources and access to the truth. And it’s up to you to decide which you believe and people should have the rights to choose and the ability to judge.

For intellectual property issue, well it is an issue. But the development of technology is trying to solve the problem. We now have the techniques to protect the copyright that people have to pay before they download the music or like some pdf files can be only accessible for a couple of days.

Finally he talks about the cost of democratization. The long tail doesn’t help in generating revenue. Too many choices also make time, the most limited and precious resource of all be challenged. And he took TV programmes as the example and discussed the downside of niche. The more specialized the niche, the narrower the market. The narrower the market, the more shoestring the production budget, which compromised the quality of the programming, further reducing the audience and alienating the advertisers. Well it is time-consuming. But everyone is different. Everyone’s needs are different. It’s our task to develop useful tools to search the exact contents that we need.