Greetings Economists, Andrew Keen silicon valley entrepreneur provides insight into the destruction of U.S. culture by amateurs. So-called Web 2.0 is shallow and incapable of deep analysis. Shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. From his controversial essay in the Weekly Standard last year, Keen has produced a new book raising alarms about social software sites like MySpace, and YouTubes 'when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/books/29book.html? _r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin This has to do with the network components of how Web 2.0 works, somewhat similar in import to the Gene theory debate. Essentially producing knowledge via these sites raises automation of the network process people engage in to create social networks. So that for example I have in my base of friends and contacts, people from Senegal, Sweden, Japan, Argentina, Italy, and so. I readily participate in Gay and Straight groups. And have great freedom to express my work in new ways that I couldn't before. I don't see Web 2.0 as particularly progressive. But it challenges kinds of capitalist modes of production that were based upon scarcity concepts of production that were poorly understood about how to regulate knowledge production. More to the point in my view than the legalism of Intellectual Property rights, they are a clash between network properties in production versus an autonomous 'gene' theory of human action. A socialist might recognize some aspects of the concept of individual autonomy in the theory as historic individual metaphysics from Locke and Hume, but I think it really rests upon how production makes knowledge. Knowledge used by ordinary people is direct to their lives and the direct contact is certainly networked as well as tidbits of autonomous learning. The direct connection requires that knowledge we produce somehow capture that in a usable fashion. So for example writing doesn't do the job nearly as well as a video recording of people doing their thing. This over production (video) of information from various sources then over powers the scarcity of older modes with so much 'stuff' that can't be absorbed. Absorption being related to connection processes and how they are built. So for example seeing the landscape is roughly 100 million light sensitive cells in the retina recording things every 100 milliseconds or so as long as we are awake. This over production of information is then funneled down to 1 million ganglion cells leading into the brain. This seen landscape is networked to usable information. The brain networks information. I don't think the concept of association captures network structure. And this networkinng is what Keen is fighting a rear guard cultural war with. thanks Doyle Saylor
