Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it's hard for users to be certain of their identity - or their agendas. Postings about political candidates, for instance, can be made by opponents disguising their motives; and propaganda can be passed off as news or information.
For that matter, as Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is becoming increasingly passe in the relativistic realm of the Web, where bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, in Keen's words, to confirm their "own partisan views and link to others with the same ideologies."
What's more, as mutually agreed upon facts become more elusive, informed debate about important social and political issues of the day becomes more difficult as well.
Although Keen's objections to the publishing and distribution tools the Web provides to aspiring artists and writers sound churlish and elitist - he calls publish-on-demand services "just cheaper, more accessible versions of vanity presses where the untalented go to purchase the veneer of publication" - he is eloquent on the fallout that free, user-generated materials is having on traditional media.
Keen argues that the democratized Web's penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threaten not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property. He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges.
And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.
"What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune," Keen writes. "The new winners - Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie - are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred.
By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites 'aggregate.' Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave."
RSS