The web is dead; long live the web. The dead web is Web 1.0. It had dial-up
connections, dot-com crashes and some of the worst business plans since
Napoleon marched on Moscow. The live web is Web 2.0. It has broadband,
enormous interactivity — or “user-generated content” — and Google, a
faith-based operation whose employees proclaim “Thank Google it’s Friday” at
the end of the working week. Web 2.0 makes money and owns the future.
The downside is that Web 2.0 may be destroying civilisation. That, at least,
is the view of Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley-based British entrepreneur and
author. He has written The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is
Killing Our Culture (due out in June), which argues that the web is an
antienlightenment phenomenon, a destroyer of wisdom and culture and an
infantile, Rousseau-esque fantasy. “It’s the cult of the child,” he says.
“The more you know, the less you know. It’s all about digital narcissism,
shameless self-promotion. I find it offensive.”
Keen is not alone in feeling queasy. Last month, a report by American
psychologists, Inflated Egos over Time, suggested that social-network sites
such as MySpace and YouTube were promoting damagingly high — and illusory —
levels of self-esteem among teenagers. Meanwhile, bloggers have been angered
— it doesn’t take much — by two high-profile attacks from the land of “dead
tree” journalism. In The Times, Oliver Kamm accused bloggers of “poisoning
debate”. “Blogs,” he wrote, “typically do not add to the available stock of
commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that
traditional media provide.” In The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland pointed out
that the abusive, vitriolic nature of many blogs had turned the blogosphere
into a “claustrophobic environment, appealing chiefly to a certain kind of
aggressive, point-scoring male — and utterly off-putting to everyone else”.
Freedland’s crucial point is that the anonymity made possible by web
protocols is at fault. People find it easy to behave badly if nobody knows
who they are.
This, in fact, is a problem built into the very fabric of the internet. Its
design was based on trust among scientists who knew each other. The network
itself was, and remains, open and flexible. But, as the web exploded, this
made life easy for harassers, abusers, spammers and hackers, who could
easily conceal their identity. This can be life-threatening. Blogger Kathy
Sierra (headrush.typepad.com)
had to go into hiding after death threats on other blogs. As a result of all
these abuses, millions are being spent on plans for a total reengineering of
the web to make it secure in the real human world of criminality and
aggression.
Should you care? At the moment, in this country at least, blogs are largely
for other bloggers, and social-networking sites largely for teenagers. Web
2.0 is a large but still specialised phenomenon. But, yes, you should care.
First, because this is, indeed, the future; and, second, because the debates
started by Keen, Kamm and Freedland are too fundamental and too big to
ignore.
To begin at the beginning: the precise nature of Web 2.0 is the subject of
some head-clutching net theology, but its important attribute is
user-generated content. “Letting regular people participate in what was
previously the domain of the few,” is how Chris Anderson puts it. Anderson
is the editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, one of the many
bibles of Web 2.0. Blogs and social-network sites allow anybody to publish
anything they want. There are more than 70m blogs in the world, and hundreds
of millions of users of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and the rest, and since all
of these numbers are growing rapidly, we are creating a world in which
everybody can talk — or, more commonly, shout — about themselves to
everybody else. This is already changing politics, the record industry,
printmedia, advertising and will, in time, change, perhaps to the point of
destruction, almost everything else.
Web prophets tend to celebrate this revolutionary transformation in straight
libertarian terms: it gives people freedom. But simple libertarianism is a
meaningless and easy creed. It takes little or no account of Isaiah Berlin’s
crucial distinction between “freedom to” and “freedom from”, the latter
requiring external controls of the individual. Or, as Kris Kristofferson put
it, rather more resonantly, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to
lose.”
In fact, the problem of blog abuse, which is now seen as damaging the entire
medium, has led some of the most senior web prophets to dilute dumb
libertarianism. Tim O’Reilly, entrepreneur and uber-blogger, and Jimmy
Wales, founder of Wikipedia, have come up with a six-point code of conduct
for blogs. Bloggers adhering to this code will carry a badge of compliance
on their sites. Whether this works or not, it shows some awareness of
criticisms like those of Kamm and Keen. But it does nothing to allay Keen’s
fears of a fundamental undermining of our culture. Is he right?
There are many ways to answer that question, but one good place to start is
another Web 2.0 bible, James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many
Are Smarter Than the Few. This is based on the insight that the expression
of many opinions is a better way of attaining either the truth or the
practical than the expressions of just a few. At its heart is a famous
anecdote about Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin. He went to an agricultural
show and watched a competition to guess the weight of an ox. Galton, a
statistician, gathered together all the guesses and averaged them. The
average was almost exactly right; the guesses of even the most expert
farmers were all wrong.
This is not to advocate simple populism, in which every judgment is based on
surges in mass opinion. Rather, a mediating process — like that of Galton or
that of the market — derives a view from averaging out popular sentiment. If
Web 2.0 expands the number of guesses by hundreds of millions, then we can,
pretty confidently, know what the ox weighs.
Such an idea is an enormous threat to our existing political culture. As
Daniel Finkelstein — master of, for me, the
best blog in Britain, says, Web 2.0’s version of the wisdom of crowds
undermines our political parties. They were founded when there was limited
“shelf space” for comment and access. But now the shelf space is effectively
infinite. We can all take part, all of the time, and individual politicians
will increasingly break away from party discipline to address the online
masses directly.
“Established media provide expertise,” says Finkelstein, “but it’s a small
sample. Some politicians resist this, but saying it’s a bad thing won’t stop
it happening.” Or, as smart blogger Tim Worstall puts it: “Knowledge and
expertise are local, and the x hundreds of thousands or millions of
bloggers will know more in detail on each and every subject than the 500 or
1,000 who work for a media organisation. There’s thus something of a
pressure on that smaller number to raise their game (all to the good, of
course).”
Both the main parties are, somewhat embarrassingly, dipping their toes in
these uncertain waters. Blair is out there on YouTube, and Cameron has the
rather more larky Webcameron. The shadow chancellor, George Osborne, has
also spoken enthusiastically about the need for politicians to fall into the
embrace of Web 2.0. But the big problem, of course, is that this logic
extends far beyond politics into the less tangible world of culture.
Here, Keen is on firm ground. Cultural continuity depends on arbitrary
authority. There is no absolute justification for teaching children
Shakespeare or maths; there is simply the necessity to teach them something
that will place them in their world and show them the height of what we
believe is the highest. But arbitrary authority is anathema to Web 2.0. It
is predicated not just on the wisdom of the crowd, but on its power. So,
Wikipedia can be written and rewritten by everybody who uses it. Applying
Surowiecki’s argument, this should mean it is the most accurate encyclopedia
in the world.
But, of course, it isn’t, because, in this case, the wisdom of the crowd fails
utterly. Wikipedia fails because, though the crowd guessed the weight of the
ox, it didn’t make the ox weigh that much. Its weight was a fact out there
in the world. An elite — scale-makers and compilers of measuring systems —
were the judges of this, not the masses.
Wikipedia has a dodgy relationship with any kind of elite. “Ess-jay”, a
prolific contributor who was said to be a professor with degrees in theology
and canon law, turned out to be Ryan Jordan, a 24-year-old college dropout
from Kentucky. Jordan exploited the trust structure of the internet
technology to pretend he was somebody else, to steal the authority of
academia. And this brings me to the heart of the matter.
In 1993, a cartoon by Peter Steiner appeared in The New Yorker. It showed a
dog at a computer screen explaining to another dog on the floor beside him
that, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Of all the things ever
said about the wired world, this was the most prophetic. For Finkelstein is
right to see that the most important part of Freedland’s argument was his
complaint about anonymity. The simple ability to conceal one’s identity is
the deep flaw in the arguments of all Web 2.0’s libertarian boosters.
Psychologists have long been aware that the more people are distanced from
each other, the easier they find it to do them harm. This degrades bloggery.
But, more important, it also threatens all forms of authority. All western —
not just scientific — wisdom is based on identity. Advocates and their
critics can be identified and their ideas formally tested. This is nothing
to do with the statistics of crowds, and everything to do with the authority
of the person. Take that away and truth and judgment become fictions;
Shakespeare is dead and the ox can weigh anything.
Freedom has its uses. I’m a blogger, and I say what I like. But, in the end,
Web 2.0 will only be good for us if, somehow, it succeeds in evolving
towards an identity-based discourse. All else is mere anarchy.
www.bryanappleyard.com
