Are Wikipedia & Google making all of us lazy?

 

We don't need to read the thoughts of 11-year-olds with a laptop, says author who warns against 'great seduction' of the web

 

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

 

The author and entrepreneur has stunned his adopted country with a book that accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into 'digital narcissism'.

Keen, who still lives in California and works in technology, questions the euphoria surrounding the rise of citizen journalism, online communities such as MySpace and user-generated websites including online encyclopedia Wikipedia and video-sharing site YouTube.

 

His book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy will be published in June, but early copies have become a rallying point for dissenters with nagging doubts about the revolution of blogs, wikis, social networking sites and podcasts.

 

Keen has been praised for applying the brakes to what seems to have become a runaway train: the idea that anyone can use technology to gain control of the media and change the world.

Keen, 47, presents a dystopian vision in which people endlessly Google themselves and expertise counts for nothing; online communities gather merely to confirm their own prejudices; internet television purports to showcase amateur talent but is dominated by corporate marketing; newspapers are driven to the wall by online advertising and news sites edited at the whimsical click of a mouse; and knowledge of history and literature becomes smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers.

 

At the current rate, he writes, by 2010 there will be more than 500 million blogs, 'so dizzyingly infinite that they've undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary'.

Keen criticises Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia for making it impossible to discern the important from the trivial. 'Wikipedia is going to become the internet,' he said. 'It does away with the distinction between the distinguished and the ordinary and becomes a bizarre compendium of information. The absence of editors means there's no way of determining whether something is important, so you get a longer entry for Pamela Anderson than Emmeline Pankhurst. I want to learn about Martin Luther's epiphany, not the epiphany of the 11-year-old who blogs next door.

 

He also insists that YouTube, the video sharing website, is not what it appears. 'The most successful videos on YouTube tend to be advertising, not real content. The idea is that anyone can be a Spielberg or Hitchcock, but it's actually a freeway to run ads.

The big companies are the only ones who win because they dress up their marketing as amateur so that it's like one big commercial break.'

 

He is equally damning about the most popular social networking site. He said: 'MySpace does not generate a healthy culture. People of like minds congregate to confirm what they want and I don't see that generating new talent or a far-reaching community. MySpace is not a community we should be proud of.'

 

To be brutally honest, the bloke has a point... the original vision of the Internet was of people coming together to share information and to communicate with each other from all five continents of the Earth has just become a huge Corporate entity... Sure, you do get some websites that are actually of use, but the vast majority are pretty much as he describes.. As for Wikipedia - he is spot on, it is an almost wholly useless piece of c**p that some idiots actually believe to be gospel fukkin' truth... The vast majority of Wikipedia's entries are not peer reviewed at all, nor do they have the proper citations or bibliographical information necessary to conduct proper research... Many uni students are stealing essays and whole articles online and passing them off as their own work, the Internet has become a Plagiarists paradise.... Of course, the vast majority get caught out, but essentially the Net promotes laziness and anti-social tendencies... the Net is a valuable tool, but too many are using it as a replacement for a real life....

To be brutally honest, the bloke has a point... the original vision of the Internet was of people coming together to share information and to communicate with each other from all five continents of the Earth has just become a huge Corporate entity... Sure, you do get some websites that are actually of use, but the vast majority are pretty much as he describes.. As for Wikipedia - he is spot on, it is an almost wholly useless piece of c**p that some idiots actually believe to be gospel fukkin' truth... The vast majority of Wikipedia's entries are not peer reviewed at all, nor do they have the proper citations or bibliographical information necessary to conduct proper research... Many uni students are stealing essays and whole articles online and passing them off as their own work, the Internet has become a Plagiarists paradise.... Of course, the vast majority get caught out, but essentially the Net promotes laziness and anti-social tendencies... the Net is a valuable tool, but too many are using it as a replacement for a real life....

 

 

Totally agree, just like you tube, mostly just stupid videos, a huge opportunity missed :unsure:

Yes, agree guys. While it's a major tools to reduce boundaries to people. It's not all plain sailing and Google searching and watching youtube is no way to get a good education, that being said for many it's a replacement for the TV which is most definitely more mind numbing.

too many are using it as a replacement for a real life....

 

 

lol.. like many who live all day on here!

I was gonna say where do forums fit into this picture :P :lol: