I don't follow...

Here's an interesting one.

Web 2.0
The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think.

Andrew Keen is not terribly – well, keen on the latest developments in the Internet.

This Web 2.0 dream is Socrates's nightmare: technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.

"This is historic," my friend promised me. "We are enabling Internet users to author their own content. Think of it as empowering citizen media. We can help smash the elitism of the Hollywood studios and the big record labels. Our technology platform will radically democratize culture, build authentic community, create citizen media." Welcome to Web 2.0.

Hmmmm... I thought I was already authoring my own content. Isn't that what you're reading right now?

Onward...

The consequences of Web 2.0 are inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts. Its empowering promises play upon that legacy of the '60s--the creeping narcissism that Christopher Lasch described so presciently, with its obsessive focus on the realization of the self.

Another word for narcissism is "personalization." Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.

Keen echoes the popular belief that the ability to customize and personalize access to information will result in each of us living in an echo chamber where all we see is ourselves reflected in wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

I don't buy this notion. While anything can be carried to extremes, there's an awful lot of room for personalization without getting anywhere near the degree of narcissism Keen alludes to.

Consider: Lots of people cook. Some are better than others, and lots of people hire others to do their cooking for them – either by hiring a cook, or by letting a restaurant do the cooking for them. All of these approaches represent ways of personalizing one's eating. In a restaurant, one can order from a menu, and further customization is often available. You know, hold the tomato, add olives. Cooking offers more chances for personalization.

Would Andrew Keen recommend that we all eat our meals in a cafeteria, with our selections made for us for the sake of exposing everyone to an enriching variety of experiences? Somehow, I rather doubt it.

Keen draws a contrast between Orwell's 1984, where

...Winston Smith's great act of rebellion in Nineteen Eight-Four [sic] was his decision to pick up a rusty pen and express his own thoughts...

and a nightmare Web 2.0 where

...everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.

One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.

But just as we share restaurants, recipes, and foods with each other, we also share ideas. When we write in a blog, or a news group or a mailing list or a fanzine, we hope someone else will read and appreciate it. The vast majority of bloggers draw on sources outside themselves for their material. This includes newspapers and magazines, and other blogs.

It might be useful to study how quickly material works its way through the blogosphere. Are there regions in the blogosphere where conservative ideas, or liberal ones, never penetrate? I read a number of blogs that provide links to pieces they disagree with, even if only, as I'm doing here, to express disagreement. Surely, at least some of these ideas will not be reflections of my own thoughts.