<videovortex> [Fwd: the anti web 2.0 manifesto]
Annet Dekker
annet at montevideo.nl
Thu Sep 27 17:21:18 CEST 2007
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: the anti web 2.0 manifesto
Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2007 16:49:04 +0200
From: Malka <malka at montevideo.nl>
To: Annet Dekker <annet at montevideo.nl>
Andrew Keen, creator of www.aftertv.com
<http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/aftertv/>, wrote a new book "The Cult of
the Amateur", which exposes the grave consequences of today’s new
participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values. The key
points of this book are summarized by Keen in THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO
(Adorno-for-idiots)
<http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2007-April/002435.html> below.
1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive
delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology in the
form of blogs, wikis and podcasts will enable everyone to become widely
read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It
suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.
2. The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will
have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism.
“Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired of telling us, undemocratic.
Taste must reside with an elite (“truth makers”) of historically
progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public,
the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this
elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will
be tasteless.
3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as
Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular
space between Frankfurt, Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology
threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of
life, a 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library of Babel”.
This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real
life, like art, shouldn’t be fantasy; it shouldn’t be fiction.
4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The
big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and
publishing houses has discovered and branded great 20th century popular
artists of such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the “Vertigo”
three). It is most unlikely that citizen media will have the marketing
skills to discover and brand creative artists of equivalent prodigy.
5. Let’s think differently about George Orwell. Apple’s iconic 1984
Super Bowl commercial is true: 1984 will not be like Nineteen
Eighty-Four the message went. Yes, the “truth” about the digital future
will be the absence of the Orwellian Big Brother and the Ministry of
Truth. Orwell’s dystopia is the dictatorship of the State; the Web 2.0
dystopia is the dictatorship of the author. In the digital future,
everyone will think they are Orwell (the movie might be called: Being
George Orwell).
6. Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a
theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long
Tail”. It is a Hayekian cottage market of small media producers
industriously trading with one another. But Anderson’s “Long Tail” is
really a long tale. The real economic future is something akin to Google
a vertiginous media world in which content and advertising become so
indistinguishable that they become one and the same (more grist to that
Frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).
7. As always, today’s pornography reveals tomorrow’s media. The future
of general media content, the place culture is going, is Voyeurweb.com:
the convergence of self-authored shamelessness, narcissism and vulgarity
-- a self-argument in favor of censorship. As Adorno liked to remind us,
we have a responsibility to protect people from their worst impulses. If
people aren’t able to censor their worst instincts, then they need to be
censored by others wiser and more disciplined than themselves.
8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and
Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy
trinity of online community,individual creativity and common
intellectual property ownership. Most of all, it’s in the marriage of
abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that
lends the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual
Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau.
9. How to resist digital utopianism? Orwell’s focus on language is the
most effective antidote. The digital utopians needs to be fought
word-for-word, phrase-by-phrase, delusion-by-delusion. As an opening
gambit, let’s focus on the meaning of four key words in the digital
utopian lexicon: a) author b) audience c) community d) elitism.
10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be
social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual
flux. Everything will be in motion; everything will be opinion. This
social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was recognized by Plato. That’s why
he was of the opinion that opinionated artists should be banned from his
Republic.
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