Our culture in ruins?

I'm in the proces of reading "The cult of the amateur" by Andrew Keen, and I know that I should probably finish it before commenting, but this guy is really depressing me. He comes across as a really grumpy old guy. His basic claim (which isn't all that far of) is that the coming of Web 2.0 is killing or culture, because basically anyone can become (and soon is) a voice on the internet. The first half of the book is filled with examples. Of how everyone cheats and lies and how we can't distinguish facts from fiction anymore. Well, here's my take: Cheats and liars have existed since we crawled out of the slime quite some time ago. Some time later, in the early days of the telegraph elaborate ways to use this new medium to cheat were not uncommon as Tom Standage explains in "the Victorian Internet".

Another example of how Web 2.0 is undermining our community is the claim that our economy is crippled by having amateurs doing the jobs of professionals. In one example he calculates that $331.000 were sucked out of the economy because a company choose to have amateurs compete to create their Super Bowl Ad. Somehow I don't really feel sorry for the Ad professionals being cheated this way. Also, could it be that the $331.000 were spent on something else, or maybe even given to shareholders? And finally - I do believe that the marketing people will have made a decent cost benefit analysis of this before going this way.

I really feel insulted that I should not be able to distinguish between what's good and what's bad. I'm a normal person - but that doesn't mean that I'm naive and don't question the validity of any source of information I come across. And even if I can't tell right from wrong, I hope that they will teach my kids more thorough source criticism, than I was taught.

The most ironic thing is that Andrew Keen has his own blog!

Sorry that there were no user focus in this entry - but I just had to get this of my chest. I'll get back when I've finished the book - I might just end up being positive after all.

Web 2.0 or is it 3.0? Second Life

In a recent article in Time Magazine, the much touted game/universe of Second Life was put in for a mid-term evaluation. Check out this quote:
The overall traffic has been disappointing: the site has nearly 8.7 million registered members, but the number of active users is closer to 600,000. One reason for this gap may be that the technology isn't intuitive. (I spent my first hour on Second Life wearing both sneakers and high heels because I couldn't figure out how to discard one pair. And yes, I passed Computer Science 101.)
From: Time Magazine: Second Life's Real-World Problems, Thursday, Aug. 09, 2007

You'll be inspired by the user behaviours described in the article. I never cease to wonder as this virtual world is mostly made up of people acting out fantasies, it will be full of "freaks" - people acting out things here that they could/would not act out in the real world. Somehow The Dice Man springs to mind.

However, as Second Life is for everyone some sort of regulation is also needed (how else to prevent the otherwise ordinary plumber becoming a child molester or serial killer?). Who provides that regulation? Or should it just run de-regulated as some sort of ultimate experiment to see if anarchy really is the way to go?