Web Culture 2.0: The Stampede
By Andrew Gonsalves
www.tfproject.org www.andrewgonsalves.com
You too can have your opinions heard on this network of nearly infinite reach. With not so much as a certification to your name, you can reach out. High tide has come and the flood of democratic internet participation has begun crashing through the levies and sandbag walls. And as the waters of free, unencumbered speech carry us into the streets where only experts once walked, we pierce the air with our battle cry. Web 2.0! Democracy will rule the internet!
We extol our wisdom, adding that we are not professionals, but we did stay at a Holiday Inn Express the previous night. We write with passion and conviction, only pausing to reference Wikipedia and our favorite blogs. Our voice is formed with the intent to pound our views into the heads of our audience, and all the while our audience is busy preparing a post of their own. Waiting your first missive is a list of links gleaned from thirteen of your opposition’s favorite message boards, citing opinions which corroborate their own; an undeniable truth.
That is Web 2.0 democracy: majority rules and debate is pretense for pageantry. Not only that, but the masses now control the truth. It is said that he who wins the war writes the book, and the traditional media is definitely not winning this one. With democratized content, users can erase the work of others that they disagree with. Corporations can white-out a black eye on their Wikipedia public record with a single keystroke. Entire representations of opinions can simply disappear on sites like Digg and Reddit, which give its users the power to make dissenting points of view vanish from consideration with a single click. The result is myopic tunnel vision, the perpetuation of unchecked conviction, and a cage match between back-patting and debate. In by the good graces of the predictable social media public, all associated with a favorite subject (both corporate and independent) are on the fast track to recognition with little check for sincerity or validity.
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one to notice the peculiar enthusiasm displayed by advocates of Adobe’s new beta release of a licensed product when it was given the spotlight on the first page of Digg. Nothing sat right with that one; from the infomercial-frankness of the praise, to the unanimous support for a product that costs $1300 for a single license, this front page article was a glistening beacon of fraudulent glory, sheltered by the good will of a democratic internet. Then there is viral marketing. In the works as I write this is a marketing campaign that is creeping toward fruition. My friend is conducting it by writing a blog for her client. Soon, there will be a shocking revelation and people will talk about it. This bit of exploitive information cuddles at night with the saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity. From their union, my friend’s client will glean momentary popularity and attention. And the consumers won’t know what hit them.
Corporate news entertainment has disenchanted us and driven us into the arms of independent, unchecked and volatile quasi-information pumped out in droves by blogs across the expanse of social media. The result is a loss of $4 billion off one corporation’s market cap because of an unchecked newsletter commenting on a bogus internal missive. The result is the loss of a primary election due to unverified claims of party infidelity. The result is a charmingly colloquial take on a situation we’re used to receiving with a modicum of professionalism.
The counter-argument to this all, as I see it, is that the alternative to this is centralized culture, which equates to soulless mainstream lowest common denominator content. Or we simply get more of the same highly streamlined information feeds with the influence of a single supervision. The decay of choice will be followed by the collapse of freedom, which is further compounded by the infliction of someone else’s will. We won’t have that, though. We will fight for our right to be mediocre in the face of art and culture. We will Digg that Paris Hilton story like there’s no tomorrow. We will ensure our roommate comes up first when you Google for “waste of sperm.” And it will be so.
DIGG