Free?

I often go out of the track and tend to be directed to read some out-of-the-field books at some point while surfing the internet or browsing scholarly works. Fortunately, most of them are interesting and stimulating. Recently I finished two of these.

The first book is Chris Anderson's Free : the future of a radical price (New York: Hyperion, 2009).

"Like it or not," Anderson says "we all live in the Google economy these days in at least some of our life." (p. 183) Free drives out professionals in favour of amateurs. Free tends to level the playing field between professionals and amateurs. (p. 234-5)

It forced me to reconsider the distinction between professionals and amateurs, and read Andrew Keen's The cult of the amateur : how today's internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2007).

In the Web 2.0 revolution, instead of a dictatorship of experts, he claims, we'll have a dictatorship of idiots.

For better or worse, everyone is simultaneously broadcasting themselves on YouTube and/or Facebook; but nobody is listening.

The Web 2.0 revolution is, as Keens argues, the great seduction. We are being deduced by the empty promise of the "democratized" media. The revolution peddles the promise of bringing more truth to more people - more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreem.

It is, in fact, delivering superficial observations rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgement. The real consequence of the great seduction is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information.