[Publib] 2.0: It cheapens us, it cheapens everyone

[Marv K.]

While I see some truth to this, I think veteran journalist Jeff
Jarvis<http://www.buzzmachine.com/about-me/>has it right when he says
much of this
2.0 stuff is nothing more than people talking. Years ago, it happened on a
street corner, at the beauty salon, or in the mall, now it happens online.
When people are talking, it's a good thing, even if too much of the talk
seems  to be nonsense, not accurate or authoritative. It's better than
silence.

Clear Channel and Rupert Murdoch's Fox own and operate a lot of traditional
media outlets and look at what they're producing. Mr. Keen (I haven't read
the book) might be deeply concerned for their welfare, I'm not.

As a podcaster, I am endlessly annoyed by the unlistenable content produced
by most of the 100,000ish podcasters out there. But, if some Howard Stern or
Oprah wannabe makes 50 people around the world smile, maybe that's not so
bad. And what if your library's RSS feed is reaching people who might never
see the news releases buried in a corner of the Saturday paper?

In all modesty, I've produced 141 editions of LibVibe: the library newscast.
As a former radio personality, I have seen the lengths traditional media
will go to in dumbing-down their product so it appeals to the biggest
numbers, lowest common denominator. I could tell you stories that would curl
your hair. NBC and Entercom aren't going to produce a library newscast,
delivering content to a niche audience that, until "Web 2.0," had to rely on
two magazines with long deadlines/production times and small staffs. Now, we
have a "radio" newscast of our own...and library interviews and
discussions...a showcase for indie music artists...and opinions from not
just Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly...and a way to do library advocacy
beyond a sign at the circ desk.

Marv K.
http://LibVibe.com/


On 29/01/2008, Joe Schallan <jschallan at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> This book from last summer got under my radar and I
> have just discovered it. Since it directly relates to
> my recent remarks on crowdsourcing, I thought I'd
> share an excerpt with the list:
>
> Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur -- How Today's
> Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our
> Economy, New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007.
>
> Blurb: In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic,
> Silicon Valley insider Keen exposes the grave
> consequences of today's new participatory Web 2.0. He
> reveals how amateur, user-generated free content
> threatens the very innovation and creativity that
> forms the fabric of American achievement.
>
>
> >From Chapter 1:
>
> . . . democratization, despite its lofty idealization,
> is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and
> belittling expertise, experience, and talent. As I
> noted earlier, it is threatening the very future of
> our cultural institutions.
>
> I call it the great seduction. The Web 2.0 revolution
> has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more
> people—more depth of information, more global
> perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate
> observers. But this is all a smokescreen. What the Web
> 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial
> observations of the world around us rather than deep
> analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered
> judgment. The information business is being
> transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a
> hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking
> about themselves.
>
> Moreover, the free, user-generated content spawned and
> extolled by the Web 2.0 revolution is decimating the
> ranks of our cultural gatekeepers, as professional
> critics, journalists, editors, musicians, moviemakers,
> and other purveyors of expert information are being
> replaced ("disintermediated," to use a FOO Camp term)
> by amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun
> moviemakers, and attic recording artists. Meanwhile,
> the radically new business models based on
> user-generated material suck the economic value out of
> traditional media and cultural content.
>
> - - - - - - - -
>
>
> Keen could have added "reference librarians" to his
> list of purveyors of expert information whose ranks
> are being decimated, of course.
>
> Excellent coverage of the book and the issues it
> raises may be found on the BBC website:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2ju5sz
>
>
> Librarians, ever eager, in their inexhaustible
> insecurity, to emulate the latest fad to prove their
> hipness and coolness, have come up with "Library 2.0,"
> a term which, as near as I can tell, means we will
> embrace all the various social-networking sites and
> tools to reach our patrons, in a sort of vast,
> blissful emailochattic, facebooky, myspaceish,
> ningytwittery, blogospheric, flickristic,
> picasametric, mahalodic, youtubian, wikidly
> del.icio.us informational orgasm.
>
> If any of you heard Joe Janes at Internet Librarian in
> Monterey, you know he excoriated librarians who gripe
> about Wikipedia's authority and accuracy but who do
> not join the Wikipedians to make the source better.
>
> Given Keen's analysis, perhaps the correct response to
> Wikipedia is precisely NOT to participate in it.
>
> I'd further ask, Why we should give away our expertise
> for nothing?  Kindle Ask NowNow thinks our expertise
> is worth exactly two cents an answer, and at that
> rate, the Mechanical Turks aren't making even
> third-world sweatshop wages. Not even remotely close,
> if you do the time and the math. Sure incentivizes
> delivery of high-quality information, eh?
>
> The crowning glory of our profession was once its
> insistence on accuracy and authority.
>
> Should we not, finally, continue to insist? Isn't such
> insistence what makes us, finally, what we are?
>
> Joe Schallan
> Phoenix
>
>
>
>
>       ____________________________________________________________________________________
> Never miss a thing.  Make Yahoo your home page.
> http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
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