Has Web 2.0 had a Corrosive Effect on Democracy?

Below is an entry I published awhile back on a collaborative blog that apparently (and unfortunately) isn't going to materialize anytime soon. The piece contains some of my thoughts on a particular criticism often leveled against the principles behind Web 2.0. I specifically address Andrew Keen's view in this piece, but his is representative of a select group of other media and technology analysts (e.g. Bryan Appleyard), so my remarks should be more widely applicable:

About two months ago, I watched a documentary on PBS entitled The Truth According to Wikipedia. As the title suggests, the film focuses on Wikipedia. But it's really an exploration of how the Internet has enabled worldwide collaborative ventures, and how this has affected the way the world gathers, assembles, shares, uses, and discusses information. The creators were able to present in a clear, informative manner (a rarity for issues-based documentaries, in my experience) the reasoning of both proponents and critics of Wikipedia-style approaches to online media.

One of the critics featured in the film is Andrew Keen, founder of the defunct website, audiocafe.com. During the 90's and early 2000's, Keen was a strong proponent of Internet ideals, such as universal access to digital content, but more recently has developed a profound distaste for all things Web 2.0. In the past few years, he has gone on the offensive, arguing that the core values of the New Internet - decentralization, participation, and user-generation of content - have had an increasingly corrosive effect on our economy, politics, and culture. Consider the following excerpt from the film, where Keen addresses an audience of Web 2.0 architects and enthusiasts who believe that their,

'MyWorld' ... will lead to 'more democracy, more equality, and more freedom.' Now I [i.e. Keen] strongly disagree; that's the essence of my polemic. I argue 'me' - that this personalization of media, personalization of culture, the fragmentation of society, indeed, into 'me,' into everything becoming increasingly more personalized, is resulting in reality in less democracy, less equality, and less freedom. (The Truth According to Wikipedia, @ circa 12:15 - 13:01)

A bold thesis, to be sure. One that challenged me to evaluate my own intuitions on this issue and intrigued me enough to read Keen's book on the subject, The Cult of the Amateur. I wanted to see how strong his argument was in support of his view. It essentially boiled down to this:

1. In order for our culture to survive. society needs "gatekeepers," individuals whose judgments and abilities to perform certain duties can be trusted.

2. Experts and professionals are the gatekeepers of society.

3. But Web 2.0 principles destroy expertise and professionalism, since they require that one extol the anonymous amateur, elevating amateur judgment and performance to a level equal with and sometimes even superior to that of the expert or professional.

4. Therefore, Web 2.0 principles are a threat to the survival of our culture.

Keen spends virtually no time arguing for (1) and (2), instead opting to make the case for (3). He cites statistics about how, since the mid-90's, profits have increasingly fallen in professional journalism and the music and film industries; he highlights cases where misinformation spread via the Internet has had damaging effects on people's personal and professional lives; and he points to trends in marketing that increasingly blur the line between advertisement and content. According to Keen, this evidence not only shows that blogs, social networking cites, and peer-to-peer file sharing technologies are responsible for lost revenue in journalism and the entertainment industry, effectively ruining the careers of media professionals the world over, it shows that amateurs and advertisers are taking over their roles and filling the Web with untrustworthy, low-quality content.

Of course, Keen's own interpretation of this evidence is questionable: one could maintain that professional journalism and the music and movie industries are seeing reduced profits because they employ a legacy business model ill-equipped for the digital age, and one could dig in one's heels and cite contrary evidence regarding the amount and quality of trustworthy content on the Internet. But debating the fine points about how Keen's evidence should be interpreted is really a moot point. His analysis suffers from a more basic problem insofar as he has, at best, shown only that increased untrustworthiness of Internet content and decreased revenue in professional journalism has coincided with the implementation of Web 2.0 principles when what he needs to show in order for his argument to work is that the implementation of Web 2.0 principles has caused the supposed 'destruction of expertise and professionalism.'

But suppose for a moment that Keen does establish a causal connection. Should it then be beyond any reasonable doubt that Web 2.0 threatens to unravel our culture? This hinges on the plausibility of Keen's assumptions that gatekeepers are needed for the continuation of culture and that only experts and professionals can fill that niche. Now even granting that professionals are to be exclusively identified with gate keepers, it doesn't necessarily follow that professionalization of a field or cultural activity will guarantee its survival. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere about my own field (i.e. philosophy), professionalization has largely proven to have a cannibalizing effect and the key to its survival may perhaps involve some degree of "informalizing" and "amatuerizing." So, contra Keen, Web 2.0 principles might enhance rather than threaten the survivability of culture in at least some cases.

Of course, Keen could admit that a healthy dose of amateurism is needed, while still maintaining that a society's culture can't do without its gatekeepers. But this begs the question: just what is it about the role of the gatekeeper that makes him or her so indispensable? According to Keen, culture is about truth, and "the gate keeper is the key player in the truth, because the gatekeeper, whether they're an editor at an encyclopedia, or a record agent, or a newspaper publisher, they're the one's who determine truth" (The Truth According to Wikipedia, @ circa 24:00-24:20) And in The Cult of the Amatuer, Keen draws on the work of anthropologist Ernest Gellner and political scientist Benedict Anderson to explain that gate keepers provide society cohesiveness by presenting the public a shared narrative and common worldview:

As anthropologist Ernest Gellner argues in his classic Nations and Nationalism, the core of the modern social contract is rooted in our common culture, in our language, and in our shared assumptions about the world. Modern man is socialized by what the anthropologist calls a common "high culture." Our community and cultural identity, Geller says, come from newspapers and magazines, television, books, and movies. Mainstream media provides us with common frames of reference, a common conversation, and common values. Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, explains that modern communities are established through the telling of common stories, the formation of communal myths, the shared sense of participating in the same daily narrative of life (The Cult of the Amatuer, p. 80).

The notion that truth, trustworthiness, and their intimate relationship (among other things) lie at the heart of culture should be unproblematic. However, Keen's description of culture's gatekeepers as determiners of truth sounds far less like our own cultural ideal - namely, a culture that is both free and democratic - and more like the ideal state of Plato's Republic. Indeed, Keen's gate keepers are virtually indistinguishable from Plato's description of the guardian class, whose role is to present a noble lie to an overwhelming mass of people inherently incapable of understanding truth. The culture Keen envisions is oligarchic, one in which societal control is placed in the hands of an elite class who have presumably exclusive access to truth and a monopoly on creativity. By contrast, a democratic society, whether it has professionals or not, leaves no room for Keen's gate keepers. It assumes a fundamentally different epistemology and "technology" - one in which each person is presumed to be endowed with an inborn capability to discern truth and to utilize their creativity for productive purposes. Reality is supposed to be the determiner of truth, and it is through observation, conversation, and debate that we arrive at it. If anything, then, the principles of Web 2.0 would seem to compliment or support the ideal of democratic culture, rather than usher in it's demise.



Has Web 2.0 had a Corrosive Effect on Democracy? by Nathan M. Blackerby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Philosophy and Free Culture, Part I

This is the first in a series of articles that I will be writing for a new magazine, called The Coffee Companion.

During the last century continuing through to the present day, philosophy has come to be identified increasingly with the work of the professional philosopher; its techniques and rich vocabulary needing years of study to master, its history seen as an artefactual object best suited for academic analysis, its practice relegated to classrooms and professional conferences, and its ideas monologically transmitted to a select audience of experts, eventually calcified in journals and books inaccessible or unknown to the general public. Unclear is whether this causes or is symptomatic of a focus on issues so esoteric and obscure as to appear altogether divorced from the questions and concerns that arise from reflection on everyday experience. What is clear is that philosophy's professionalization marks the beginning of its virtual extinction outside the cloistered halls of the University.

The logic of professionalism demands that the responsibility of doing philosophy rests on the shoulders of those who receive pay for it. The reality of professionalism demands that the non-philosopher have no time for it. This leaves the general impression nowadays that philosophers make a career of dealing with philosophical issues so that the public no longer needs to. Jane Doe, Eddy Punchclock, and Joe the Plumber can rest at night knowing that their tax dollars and payments on their children's college tuition support Steve the Scientist's research which will spark technological innovation, Bob the Business Professor's training of legions of entrepreneurs destined to create new markets or redefine old ones, and Bella the Biologist's work on fighting life-threatening diseases. The tasks of one's own profession coupled with the hustle and bustle of day to day living are often so consuming that simultaneously taking on the task of another profession becomes practically unimaginable. Jane, Eddy, and Joe aren't expected to perform the tasks that Steve, Bob, and Bella's respective professions demand. So why should philosophy be any different? What makes Pete the Philosopher's quest to tackle Life's Big Questions - or whatever it is that philosophers do - an exception?

Often coupled with the logic and reality of professionalism is the notion that the worth of an activity or discipline should be measured by the degree to which it can maximize productivity and financial benefit. All this coalesces to the point where utilization of one's talents and intellectual abilities for reflection on things beyond one's own profession becomes optional. This spells bad news for philosophy: not only does it “bake no bread,” it doesn't even help one effectively sell the bread one bakes. For all intents and purposes, the professional non-philosopher's engagement in philosophy reduces to recreation and even the professional philosophers' work is best regarded with marginal importance.

In the current state of the art, then, consideration about whether one should refrain from doing philosophy is virtually self-affirming, since philosophical reflection appears to bear little significance to action. Yet, ironically, a tinge of reflection on the above appraisal quickly reveals that one should proceed with caution in endorsing a system that takes action as the sole determinant of value. Though it may be true that certain principles are rejected or endorsed on account of the actions to which they lead, it is nevertheless also true that actions are treated with contempt or esteem on account of their agreement or disagreement with principles. Thus, if action is itself treated as the final evaluative principle, one should only unreflectively endorse those actions one already engages in.

The danger in all this is that as actions change, one would lack the sense to determine whether one's actions should have changed. What hangs in balance here outstrips individual concern. An unreflective public in the habit of making irrationally uninformed decisions would be prepared to surrender voluntarily whatever social and political power they might have for the sake of salvaging or enhancing some feature of commercially productive action. Were the loss of critical self-awareness to become commonplace (as some may argue it already has), this would spell disaster for free and democratic culture, since the latter depends on individuals taking responsibility for making rationally informed decisions in the common interest. As such, widespread philosophical reflection treated in high regard appears essential to the preservation of free, democratic culture. Yet in order for this to be realized, philosophy would need to be restored in some measure to its Socratic origins as an activity in which members of society participate in a collective, public, and sustained cross-examination of tacit assumptions about human conduct and the world. That is, philosophy must be understood to be more than mere profession.

Philosophy and Free Culture, Part I by Nathan M. Blackerby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

The Suppression of Online Journalism

This past Friday, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! interviewed journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of The Blogging Revolution. They discussed how many non-Western bloggers have been arrested and suppressed by government institutions of their respective countries just because they pose a threat to the status quo:

Many people in these countries, of course, can’t rely on state-run media, which is propaganda... Blogging is a way of trying to express different views. So in every country I went to, except for Cuba, where the internet is very underdeveloped, you have situations, people blogging about sex, about drugs, about gender issues, about politics. The majority of people in these countries don’t blog politically. They blog about their personal lives, about their boyfriends, their girlfriends. But there is increasingly, as that report states, many, many regimes who are fearful of the fact that you have independent voices, simply put. (Democracy Now!)

What is most troublesome, however, is that Google, Yahoo! and others have actually complied with these governments to achieve the goal of suppressing the coverage bloggers offer:

With the assistance of Western multinationals like Yahoo!, who have actually given information to the regime to assist these people being put in jail. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco, other security firms, internet firms, have sadly and shamefully been involved in these kind of complicity acts. And... one of the things I discuss in the book is to actually have more transparency about how those guys actually operate in those kind of countries. (Democracy Now!)

Google, Microsoft, etc. may be multinational, but they're still US-based companies. One should expect them to uphold in their international dealings certain core rights and values that define the United States: the right to free speech, the right to dissent, and civil disobedience. The fact that Google and Microsoft's market extends to nations whose regimes currently ignore such values and violate such rights doesn't entail that we should tolerate Google and Microsoft's current "when in Rome" attitude. These values and rights aren't bound by time, place and circumstance. They are supposed to apply universally. Hence any compliance with regimes whose interest is to suppress civil disobedience and dissent should be treated for what it is: compromise. Of course, such compromise is unsurprising in a world where market values have come to trump or altogether displace democratic and moral values; where nations, communities, and the people who inhibit them are seen as a mere means to profit rather than invaluable ends in themselves.

UPDATE: Check out this BBC news story about two Burmese bloggers who were arrested within the past year and recently received the 'cyber-dissent award.' Also, check out the Committee to Protect Bloggers. They've got a lot of coverage dealing with bloggers who were arrested for speaking out.


The Suppression of Online Journalism by Nathan M. Blackerby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

An rwx World

This week, I came across a number of interesting videos and books that deal with so-called intellectual property, copyright issues, digital media, the free culture movement, Creative Commons licensing, and other related matters.

The first of which is a film called Good Copy, Bad Copy, which was released in 2007. It focuses largely on the creation of new music through sampling, the entertainment industry's opposition to file-sharing, and in a subtle way, the economics that underlie copyright issues. Perhaps most interesting to my mind was the segment that covers the Motion Picture Association of America's influence on Swedish authorities shutting down The Pirate Bay in May/June 2006. Since the Pirate Bay is in Swedish territory, and thus does not fall under US jurisdiction, the Pirate Bay isn't restricted by the copyright standards found in the US, and so no one could be detained nor could the state prohibit the Pirate Bay's continuation. Check out the film:





Next is a recently published book by James Boyle entitled The Public Domain. It's available as a pdf for free download. You can also freely read it online in html at Yale University Press. As one would expect from a book, The Public Domain goes into greater depth than Good Copy, Bad Copy concerning fair use and intellectual property issues. However, it is also broader in scope, as it addresses such things as invasive techniques to control what we are allowed to do with, what we are capable of doing with, and how we actually use media and software. Thus he carries on an extended discussion of such things as DRM, and proprietary vs. free and open source software. His message is a simple one: the public domain is worth preserving. Well, duh. Shouldn't that be a no-brainer? Unfortunately, for some people it isn't.

I also came across a recent interview with Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose, as well as a presentation Lessig gave at a conference hosted by Google in 2006. In the Charlie Rose interview, Lessig discusses his relationship with Barack Obama and how he has known Obama since the beginning of Obama's career as a law professor. He also discusses the influence of money in politics and how we need to work toward more open governance, his motivation for the establishment of Change Congress.





The only unique things I found about Lessig's Google presentation is that he compares Creative Commons licenses with the GNU General Public License, and that, during the Q & A period, he addresses some deeper philosophical questions about intellectual property vs. fair use. Beyond that, the rest is really just an extended version of a talk he gave at TED in 2007. So if you don't have an hour and fifteen to spare, check that out instead.





Finally, I read a long essay (or short book - whichever you prefer to call it, I guess) by Douglas Rushkoff entitled Open Source Democracy. It was published in 2003 by DEMOS and, like The Public Domain, is available for free download. Rushkoff's thesis is that political communities have been based largely on a top-down, proprietary model, in which power and decision-making is vested in a centralized group. By contrast, free and open source communities exhibit an emergent, bottom-up, and participatory model, in which power and decision-making is largely decentralized and vested in each member of the community. As such, free and open source communities provide an example of an alternative model for politics and governance. Check out p. 59-60, where Rushkoff draws a parallel between free and open source models and the economics of E.F. Schumacher.

Rushkoff's book is good insofar as it takes a first step towards addressing how free and open source models might be suggestive for new forms of government and politics. However, I found his argumentation a bit too loose at times. In the coming weeks I hope to post a blog that makes a stronger connection between free culture, open source, etc. and democracy. At any rate, Open Source Democracy is worth the hour and a half or so it takes to read.


An rwx World by Nathan M. Blackerby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.