Online business Toolkit

Raging against the internet machine

Tags:
Web 2.0,
Lee Siegel,
Social Networking

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 29 May 2008 15:19 BST

...disclose secrets from their private life, you have people faking their secrets and privacy to attract other people. This is a new style of personality. It's a new wrinkle in social life.

People have a way of adapting and it's not necessarily bad. You're opening up a larger space for yourself, but we have to also look at the dark side of that. In America you have the new genre of the fabricated memoir — lonelygirl15, for example. Instead of people being appalled, people are delighted and embrace it. The hoax is becoming a whole new brand of entertainment. It's liberating but where does it leave us? Why are we tolerating lies?

The internet is also, clearly, very effective at exposing lies.
That's a really interesting issue. Is it making politicians more honest or is it making people ever more careful about what they say? Is it creating more artifice in the public realm? Look at what happened with [Barack] Obama: he goes to a fundraising event, invites a citizen journalist and she catches him out [with his comment about "working-class people"]. Suddenly there's a firestorm about him. The Huffington Post played it up for the sake of hits and now Obama is even more careful of what he says.

The same goes for journalists; will it make them more truthful or ever more cautious of reporting the truth? You have to be careful not to enrage people in general, and be careful about your sources and who you talk to. The New York Times has been criticised by the blogosphere for using anonymous sources. Where would American journalism be without Deep Throat?

I'd love to see the cultural hegemony of the Google ethos overturned. Everything's being filtered and organised and put on the marketplace

Many major news sites have 'most emailed' and 'most read' lists, but these are not always the most meaningful stories. A lot of community radio stations' mandate is to report on unpopular stories. Whatever happened to the virtue of being unpopular? Everything is about success and winning. When you have editors who always wanted their stories to be popular but are now turning their full attention to that, you are not going to have the [smaller stories].

But surely that is an area where the web excels. A lot of people go to niche or subject-specific sites rather than the kind of mainstream sites where stories about Britney Spears will overshadow others.
In my book, I talk about how wonderful blogs are on every aspect of human life. Many blogs are public-service revelations and delights, but what my book takes up are these broader trends. The web can take pathologies in society and hasten them. You have these users who are more polite and can share their interests but, behind that, I want to talk about the principle of interactivity — the illusion that people can be as much producers as users. Are they producers? Are their voices as heard as those of the people who own the means of production on that site? Is this whole 'prosumerist' idea just a way of bringing in consumers under the guise of being producers?

I want to understand the principle of interactivity. In general, what does it mean for society? What does it mean that we're no longer passive consumers of entertainment? The answer I come up with is it brings all of cultural activity into the realm of the marketplace. If you're making a transaction, you're aggressive and participatory. If you're reading a book, you are not part of the marketplace energy.

What about people's tendency to develop an immunity to, say, pop-up ads?
Pop-ups are only the most obvious incursion of commerce into the web. What about Google's page rank? I'd love to see the cultural hegemony of the Google ethos overturned. Everything's being filtered and organised and put on the marketplace. It's great for business, but not always. We have to think about whether it's great for human relations.

A musician might find the internet a good way to bypass the old recording-label system. What would your solution be for the web's problems, without throwing the baby out with the bath water?
I don't agree with all the hand-wringing over the fate of the big recording labels. I don't care about them; they are horribly corrupt and crushing, and the same goes for...