Lan Barnes wrote:
On Mon, May 5, 2008 10:49 pm, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Todd Walton wrote:
"We're natively good at forming groups." "People like community."
It just seems so trite.
Welcome to the Web 2.0 circlejerkers.
Now, when one of these "luminaries" finally figures out how to harness
this stuff to do good for society rather than just sell crap, we have a
revolution.
I'm not holding my breath.
-a
How absolutely right you and Todd are! What brilliant pundits you both
are! Truthout, MoveOn, the Kplug list, and for that matter, Linux itself
just don't exist ... mirages, figments of the fevered imagination of these
self-styled gurus, not nearly as smart as you.
QROTF ... OK, not so quietly.
While I presume you are being funny, I'm going to tackle your points
anyway. That's my prerogative as a pundit.
Please notice that we're talking about the "Web 2.0" breathless pundits.
Most of the things you mention the Web 2.0 punditry would place in
the category of "old, busted, and dead and we should get rid of them."
For starters, let's tackle Linux and mailing lists.
Mailing lists are nasty, ancient technology that the Web 2.0 folks would
like to get rid of. The fact that we sit here debating that on a
text-based mailing list and have a bunch of people complaining about
crappy web forums is a testament to their error.
Open source worked just fine for many years even before the internet.
Academic sharing worked with magtapes, people exchange, etc. The
internet speeded a lot of things up--no doubt. However, that really
isn't a fundamental shift that the Web 2.0 folks will be happy to tout.
And, as much as I like Linux, Linux itself hasn't really driven a social
change. Many people were hoping that OLPC would be that social change
made manifest. Microsoft seems to have stopped that rather nicely. I'm
skeptical that OLPC was the revolution everybody thought it was. The
third world doesn't need computing technology--it needs teachers.
Learning by yourself is hard; it's not clear OLPC helped that.
Truthout, MoveOn, etc. did not manage to successfully expose or oppose a
corrupt, fascistic administration. The President has more evidence
against him and lower numbers than Nixon, and nobody who knows this can
dislodge him. If anything, that's *huge* proof that those sites have
*failed*. Horribly.
They are still not managing to connect to anyone but the converted. The
proof of this is the fact that Howard Dean actually had to make a
strategic decision to go onto the enemy, Fox News, because he needs to
in order to preach to someone other than the converted. Not exactly a
revolution.
In spite of this, I *am* optimistic. I believe that we are in the midst
of revolution and are missing the forest for the trees. I suspect that
it will be driven by a rejection of consumerism when the next generation
realizes that they will never have the same standard-of-living as their
parents.
I just don't believe that the Web 2.0 circlejerkers can see the forest
either.
-a
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