I'd like to discuss on the matter.
Rubbish piles up in the dead end of Cyburbia
By James Harkin
Anybody heard of Facebook? Facebook.com is a place where school and university students go to kill time and - in the digital equivalent of a hello "poke" their friends, just for fun. It must be a great deal of fun because, according to a recent survey, Facebook has become the favourite online hang-out of young American men and women between the ages of 17 and 25. If you are over 30 and use it, you are probably either a predatory paedophile or a potential
investor.
The second coming of the worldwide web is taking its inspiration from a clutch of so-called "social networking sites" just like Facebook. In the course of the past decade, many of us - especially teenagers and young adults - have quit staring at the box in the corner of the room and moved to the spare room to stare at each other instead. We do so via a matrix of websites, all peopled from the ground up, such as the self-broadcaster YouTube, the vast calling-card emporium MySpace and the virtual universe Second Life. To technology geeks all this is known as online social networking, or web 2.0. For millions of young people, it is the only culture and the only kind of community worth having. Its avenues have become huge pleasure parks through which almost every facet of human experience can be funnelled.
Now come the first rumblings of a backlash, and from within the ranks of the digerati themselves. The internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley veteran Andrew Keen has won plaudits and fame for his forthcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur, in which he argues web 2.0 has become a virtual dumping ground for the inane ravings of self-made nothings and of talentless empty vessels. Mr Keen is not the only dot-commer to be worried by the direction the web is headed. Last year, in a controversial essay posted online, the digital guru Jaron Lanier argued that the collective intelligence often attributed to web-based collaborations such as Wikipedia - the so-called "hive mind" - was vastly and laughably overrated.
The disgruntled dot-commers have obvious axes to grind, but they are also on to something. In the 1960s the grandfather of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, predicted that electronic media were digging the foundations of a "global village", a smaller and more harmonious place in which each of us would become aware of our responsibilities to the rest of the world. Forty years later, when we stare out of the window on to the web, what we see instead is a sordid cauldron of voyeurism and exhibitionism - instead of web 2.0, we might just as easily call it Cyburbia. Our deference to the user-generated architecture of the place has made it into a headless monster, prone to ill-considered flurries of enthusiasm and dangerous stampedes. Its rumour mill can deflate reputations without reason, bully journalists and politicians and poison the terms of public debate.
The battle over the future of the web, however, is much more than a tussle between evangelists for web 2.0 and stuck-in-the-mud internet entrepreneurs.
Much more worrying than the myriad boosters of the "hive mind" is thatour traditional cultural gatekeepers have been so quick to throw in the towel.
Panicked by the growth of Cyburbia, they are in danger of losing their sense of perspective. In July 2005, for example, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580m, money that could have been spent refurbishing his newspapers for the digital age. We can hardly blame marketers and media conglomerates for rushing to take advantage of this orgy of self-expression, but they should remind themselves that the architecture of Cyburbia is fragile. The hundreds of millions of people who pitch up in one of its car parks could decamp just as quickly as they arrived.
This week, Mr Murdoch summoned his top executives to his ranch in California for another brainstorm aimed at breathing new life into his newspapers and media outlets, many of which have suffered from the shift of young eyeballs in the direction of Cyburbia. Half-way through those deliberations, however, he took time off to put in a $5bn (GBP2.5bn) bid for Dow Jones, one of the oldest media brands. Maybe he has realised that, in the brave new world of web 2.0, it is better to put your faith in brands that can act as trusted gatekeepers than to invest in the fickle whims of the online crowd. In the endless jumble sale that characterises Cyburbia, in among the voyeurs, the exhibitionists, the angry young men and the wheeler-dealers, anyone who owns the parking lot can make a quick buck. But let no one think that what is being sold is anything
other than crap.
The writer's book, Big Ideas, will bepublished this year by Atlantic
Books
investor.
The second coming of the worldwide web is taking its inspiration from a clutch of so-called "social networking sites" just like Facebook. In the course of the past decade, many of us - especially teenagers and young adults - have quit staring at the box in the corner of the room and moved to the spare room to stare at each other instead. We do so via a matrix of websites, all peopled from the ground up, such as the self-broadcaster YouTube, the vast calling-card emporium MySpace and the virtual universe Second Life. To technology geeks all this is known as online social networking, or web 2.0. For millions of young people, it is the only culture and the only kind of community worth having. Its avenues have become huge pleasure parks through which almost every facet of human experience can be funnelled.
Now come the first rumblings of a backlash, and from within the ranks of the digerati themselves. The internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley veteran Andrew Keen has won plaudits and fame for his forthcoming book, The Cult of the Amateur, in which he argues web 2.0 has become a virtual dumping ground for the inane ravings of self-made nothings and of talentless empty vessels. Mr Keen is not the only dot-commer to be worried by the direction the web is headed. Last year, in a controversial essay posted online, the digital guru Jaron Lanier argued that the collective intelligence often attributed to web-based collaborations such as Wikipedia - the so-called "hive mind" - was vastly and laughably overrated.
The disgruntled dot-commers have obvious axes to grind, but they are also on to something. In the 1960s the grandfather of media studies, Marshall McLuhan, predicted that electronic media were digging the foundations of a "global village", a smaller and more harmonious place in which each of us would become aware of our responsibilities to the rest of the world. Forty years later, when we stare out of the window on to the web, what we see instead is a sordid cauldron of voyeurism and exhibitionism - instead of web 2.0, we might just as easily call it Cyburbia. Our deference to the user-generated architecture of the place has made it into a headless monster, prone to ill-considered flurries of enthusiasm and dangerous stampedes. Its rumour mill can deflate reputations without reason, bully journalists and politicians and poison the terms of public debate.
The battle over the future of the web, however, is much more than a tussle between evangelists for web 2.0 and stuck-in-the-mud internet entrepreneurs.
Much more worrying than the myriad boosters of the "hive mind" is thatour traditional cultural gatekeepers have been so quick to throw in the towel.
Panicked by the growth of Cyburbia, they are in danger of losing their sense of perspective. In July 2005, for example, Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace for $580m, money that could have been spent refurbishing his newspapers for the digital age. We can hardly blame marketers and media conglomerates for rushing to take advantage of this orgy of self-expression, but they should remind themselves that the architecture of Cyburbia is fragile. The hundreds of millions of people who pitch up in one of its car parks could decamp just as quickly as they arrived.
This week, Mr Murdoch summoned his top executives to his ranch in California for another brainstorm aimed at breathing new life into his newspapers and media outlets, many of which have suffered from the shift of young eyeballs in the direction of Cyburbia. Half-way through those deliberations, however, he took time off to put in a $5bn (GBP2.5bn) bid for Dow Jones, one of the oldest media brands. Maybe he has realised that, in the brave new world of web 2.0, it is better to put your faith in brands that can act as trusted gatekeepers than to invest in the fickle whims of the online crowd. In the endless jumble sale that characterises Cyburbia, in among the voyeurs, the exhibitionists, the angry young men and the wheeler-dealers, anyone who owns the parking lot can make a quick buck. But let no one think that what is being sold is anything
other than crap.
The writer's book, Big Ideas, will bepublished this year by Atlantic
Books
4 comments:
There's a lot of thinking along these lines going on at the moment - my former organisation is running a couple of conferences later this year: the starting point in designing them was the question "why has the web been so good for shoppers, ranters and wankers, but so bad at supporting democracy and public engagement?".
I think that's the wrong question: it's like asking why books havent created a fairer distribution of wealth between the developed and developing worlds. Books, and the web, are simply support mechanisms. I think it's arguable that the web has been hugely successful at creating communities of interest - enabling me to get together with, say, train spotters from anywhere in the world, irrespective of geography. That is more than we could have hoped, isn't it?
So, at bottom, I don't really understand what these people are complaining about.
One of the concerns of media companies is in what to invest as the internet generation gets easily bored with internet groups and switches to the latest fashion.
It seems that only google is getting it right, with bloggers. you tube and now igoogle and all the gadgets ( thanks to which I can play pacman at work!)
While myspace memberships grew esponentionally in the first 2 years, the number of users has now peaked and recently there are more users closing their account thank new ones opening one.
The glory has now switched to facebook and it will soon go somewhere else. So is it lucrative to invest in them, probably, but for a very small time, it's not longlasting, because we want something new every day.
Then there is the argument on wikipedia, does free editing really give right news? to be honest I like wikipedia and we didn't have a source like that. If you see something incorrect, you can do something about it and it's free. Were encyclopedia britannica or the equals in different countries educating people? no, just the few that had the money and space to keep the 20 volumes that needed constant updates. As this stand, wikipedia is ready available to everybody and probably has done more to inform people and reach them than any other erudite mean.
Secondlife is instead a case of its own, controversial as well.
On one side there are the people that created there their life as they wanted it, having the jobs they wanted, the relationships they wanted and express their fetish freely. There are the ones making money out of it selling gadgets, houses, clothes and so on to make your caracter beautiful and appealing. There are even celebrities, in real life they complain that paparazzi follow them everywhere and what they do? they create their similar in secondlife.. A.D.D. anybody??
While would you spend all your time in front of the computer instead of going out? Some people are finding confidence, their cool caracter is teaching them how to interact, they weren't able to do that in real life, because society nailed them as geeks or ugly or fat or gay or whatever.
And then there are the papers.. Definetely more people read them on the internet.. and this is worrying companies as they have to find new source of making money..
It's definetely right to distribute free papers, but why nobody is complaining about the huge waste of paper that they generate?
All good questions! Local authorities here are beginning to argue that the publishers should pay the huge additional recycling costs involved in disposing of their free newspapers (the new London evening freebies are producing 3 tons a day - 1,000 tons a year!).
I went to a great lecture by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger a few months back, in which he was talking about exactly this issue: how do media companies, especially those producing "news", make money in a digital age? The Guardian newspaper makes a loss which is subsidised by other parts of the group - particularly Autotrader, a listings paper for people buying & selling cars. That sort of stuff is exactly what the web does better than print, so the days of that rag being profitable must be numbered. Meanwhile, Guardian Unlimited has more users than any UK new media site other than the BBC. It has more US readers daily than UK readers (and is the biggest liberal newspaper website in the US!). It makes a loss on every visitor.
How can vast multinational media producers compete against people who are running global websites (like Craig's List) from above a shop? The founder of Craig's List has apparently been offered billions for his site, but refuses to sell. The economics of running it how he does are totally different from, say, Time Life, which has just moved into its highly prestigious multi-million dollar headquarters.
So the economics are tricky. The broader social questions - what effect is this having on our society, are we "better" or "worse" off, how "reliable" is the web (can it be "trusted"), and so on - are even trickier.
This is all really interesting, and I would love to sit and chat with all of you about this. As you know I am writing my thesis on Web 2.0 applied to transnational civil society initiatives, be they activist movements or cooperation projects. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, I will have some more evidence to suggest that the internet has not only been good for shoppers, ranters and wankers.
In any case, the FT article misses a number of points, as well as reducing the entire Web 2.0 to Facebook, which is clearly wrong. As Tim O'Reilly says - the founder of Wireless Magazine and the man who coined the term 'Web 2.0 - what is different about this new generation of web systems is that they are horizontal platforms, they harness the power of the collective, as opposed to trying to tell it what to do. Is this a bad thing? It's too early to say, there are signs that lead in both directions.
Yes crowds are fickle, superficial and can turn nasty. But that's not Web 2.0's fault, more the fault of the values that our societies celebrate (and where more than in traditional media?). And Web 2.0 has given a space and a voice to many people who would otherwise be silenced by the mainstream media. It is not surprising that the FT dislikes this. What amazes me is that it expects us to buy into its ideology, without realising that life (and people) are more complicated than market regulations.
The truth is: within the cloud of teenage idiocy there are voices that point accusatory fingers at those who all-too-often want us to believe that another world just isn't possible. And what sends shivers down their spines is that they haven't figured out how to silence these voices and prevent the crowds from grasping this elementary truth. Because if they do, a lot of people up there will be in deep, deep trouble...
End of rant.
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