...
What is the world coming to?
Anyway, I've been invited by kind Trebor to join your newsgroup and discuss/defend/critique my ideas.
Trebor will post my anti Web 2.0 manifesto (aka: Adorno-for-idiots).
So that should provide some lite afternoon reading for y'all.
All the very best from sunny south-central Berkeley,
Andrew
THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Adorno-for-idiots) by Andrew Keen
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 threa...
Read more...