…the means of production and dissemination are shifting, and the cacophony of internet voices means we all feel lost in the woods.
Really?
This implies that online audiences are in a permanent state of confusion over what is trustworthy, accurate, expert, authoritative, etc.
In this increasingly media-savvy generation, are people really that confused about the nature of user-generated content?
It’s nonsense isn’t it? People have always been told not to believe everything they read. It’s as applicable to the web as it is a newspaper. I know whose blogs I trust more than others, and we have the means to filter them with technology like RSS etc.
Comment by Dave Briggs | 28 January 2008, 5:48 pm
Well the article and its accompanying video are horrible and in that sense proving their own point–i.e. they don’t understand this particular information/technology landscape either. The web has been overhyped and overvalued since the beginning and “Web 2.0″ is no exception. And in some sense it is a self-feeding machine now, with so much of that hype originating in the navel-gazing blindrooms of the nerdosphere.
I think the long-term winners are those that focus on tools that solve age-old problems of information and communication, or introduce new constraints on the collective load introduced by all these new technologies. Otherwise we’re just going to continue to have cycles of premature load-blowing over each new trend and a collective retreat when we realize it’s much better when we take our time and enjoy the process and respect one another. And we’ll have somewhat sad press like that above each time we cycle through.
Comment by Daniel Miller | 28 January 2008, 6:54 pm