Andrew Keen
Is the web 2.0 a force for good?
This is a question which has been playing on my mind for a while. The problem is that there is no easy answer. Yes, an idealistic view of web 2.0 is that it should offer everyone a voice – the platform to express their views and beliefs to the world. However, idealistic views and reality are not the same thing, if they were we would all be clamouring towards communism.
Too often we hear the words of Brin, Schmitt, Chen, Stone and Zuckerberg extolling how web 2.0 has/is/will revolutionised the world. How it is a force for good, how it liberates, connects and enriches, which of course it does…usually.
Like so much else though, it needs to be moderated with common sense, expertise and some agreed boundaries – which sadly it isn’t.
As Andrew Keen the flip side of the Zuckerberg coin is more than happy to point out, web 2.0 is the wild west of the internet – unregulated uncontrolled and VERY dangerous.
Where as traditional media ran the risk of being biased, it was regulated and there was accountability. Where it used to be very much a case of ‘them and us’, now it is just ‘us’. The creators of internet content are often no better informed than their readers and therein lies the problem.
When we visit the internet we may well be looking for confirmation/affirmation of something we believe or we may be researching, but unfortunately the information collected may have been created by some teenager with little or no knowledge of the subject.
A perfect example of this is Wikipedia. More inaccurate than accurate as the 91,000 anonymous contributors toil away to write and edit articles from every corner of the globe. Articles that they are highly unlikely to have any knowledge or education about, articles for which they are probably researching by using the internet…possibly even Wikipedia!
So, how do we temper the evangelistic viewpoint of the pioneers of web 2.0 with the common sense of people like Keen?
Well, that’s the tricky bit I guess. We mustn’t lose sight of what web 2.0 can offer us, but equally we shouldn’t assume that it will automatically get there.