The Very First Time I'm Commenting on Something I read on The Weekly Standard

I ended up on The Weekly Standard trying to figure out why they were suddenly our biggest referer. An article about "Web 2.0" and its perils linked to us because we own the domain name Kafka.com, and the author was, I gather, searching for something about Kafka. He liked the quote we have on our main page, wanted to use it, and, I suppose, felt compelled to give a nod to the blog as the source of the quote.

The article itself was on a subject that interests me, so I actually read it. And, despite appearing on a mad right-wing magazine's website, it does not seem especially mad itself. Mostly wrong, I think, but not mad.

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.

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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.

[...]

The purpose of our media and culture industries--beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people--is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century.

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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.

The article is a bit of a fluff piece, if you ask me (which you didn't, and if you got here via the article itself, why would you listen to anything I had to say anyway, since I'm a mad left-wing blogger and am not reflecting your own thoughts right back at you?)

A number of different arguments 'against' Web 2.0 are made:

1) Economic: Web 2.0 is a lot of technological utopian hype that could result in a terrible bubble and crash.

Okay, sure, but what else is new? How is this relevant to the rest of the article, which makes a moral case against the very concept of Web 2.0?

2) Political ad hominem:Hippies are involved, and sometimes people who like Web 2.0 say something that sounds like Marx. Therefore, it must be bad.

Not even going to bother to address this one.

3) Delusional: The mainstream culture industry is primarily concerned with discovering, nurturing, and rewarding 'elite talent' and only, as a kind of prerequisite, to be mentioned as a mere aside, with making money. Therefore, those who are promoted by the mainstream media are deserving, and those who are left out in the cold to make their own podcasts and write their own blogs are not.

Can the author honestly believe that this is the case? Hitchcock may have worked within the studio system, and Mozart did get backing from powerful patrons, but Van Gogh as an example of how the MSM is important to nurturing artists? Many, many artists who are justly famous and respected now were not at the time they were making their art. The most famous, rewarded, nurtured, and promoted artists today are by no means the most talented. I freely admit that most of what's out there on the internet, produced by amateurs is mediocre, but I doubt that the wisdom of the crowd of internet users, choosing what to read, watch, and listen to on the basis of aesthetics, could turn out to be worse than the wisdom of those in the MSM who choose what to serve up to us on the basis of how much money it will make for their stockholders. No doubt the 'democratization of content' will change the 'culture industry', but I see no evidence that it will change it for the worse. Maybe not for the better, either, but it's more likely than not. Consuming quality culture may arguably be a better use of time than producing junk, but given the culture we're offered by the MSM, frankly, we may as well produce our own junk instead.

4) Interesting, but not as big a worry as the author thinks it is: Personalization results in ever-increasing self-absorption -- we read only our own thoughts and consume only things we already like. This will destroy our shared culture and replace it with overwhelming mediocrity, which will be so huge and mediocre that we won't be able to remember anything about it, and will fall into amnesia.

This is the only interesting argument given, and it's one that we agree with, but only in reference to the provision of news, and, even more narrowly, only to the provision of news in the form of facts.

We believe that facts exist. It would be nice if we all got our facts from the same sources, and could agree that those sources were, in general, making a good faith effort to provide the correct facts. As long as we are all working with the same set of facts, I see no reason why bloggers are unqualified to provide their own analysis and interpretations of them.

Unfortunately the MSM news services have fallen down on their jobs of providing even the facts, so bloggers are having to take up the slack there. (Not me -- I don't do the fact-digging, but lots of bloggers really do - they make calls, go to courthouses and photocopy documents, cultivate sources, etc.) And, I'd argue, the news services are failing precisely because increasingly, their purpose is the purpose of the rest of the MSM -- make money.

I can't speak for the Web 2.0 venture capitalists out there -- presumably they think there's some way to make money off the whole thing, and I guess that, as before, a few of them will, and most of them will fail spectacularly. But there is something truly amazing about the number of people producing their own content on the web through purely volunteer efforts. Sure, a lot of it sucks. A lot of it is self-absorbed. But there's also a lot of very good amateur writing out there. People donate their time to blogs for many different reasons. Most blogs that get read at all (even if by just a handful of people, as ours is) are not intended as vehicles for a kind of resentful and aggressive self-realization "I'm as good as any of your published authors, damnit!".

Take The Biscuit Report, for example. We are nobody important, merely reasonably informed citizens trying to participate in the conversations that are essential to democracy. It is not the product of resentful anti-elitism to want to constructively contribute to such conversations. We should not have to leave this conversation to MSM-approved commentators. All writers, artists, etc., amateur and professional, good and not-good, are driven in some part by ambition, or narcissism, or something self-interested, and we would not claim to be otherwise. But if we offered nothing to our readers, they wouldn't bother reading us. They'd be too busy reading their own damn blogs.

In any case, despite the dream of a perfectly personalized web, we are not yet and may never be entirely there. There is still an element of serendipity on the web: a writer for The Weekly Standard looks up Kafka and reads Biscuit; and then I read The Weekly Standard. Look! Someone else's thoughts! Even ones worth commenting on.