Posted on 07/08/2007 8:04:54 PM PDT by dennisw
Your child is next door on the computer, destroying the world as we know it and wrecking two of the most fundamental values that underpin society - first, as I shall explain, the distinction between truth and falsehood; second, the inviolability of personal property.
While the little blighter is about it, your darling ten-year-old is also helping to destroy the record industry, the publishing industry, newspapers and cinema. And what is more, this activity is highly addictive, and is more likely than not to make young people into addicts of gambling, pornography and insidious forms of self-deception.
Maybe you think that is an exaggerated reaction to watching a young person slump down in front of the lap-top with that intensity of concentration which is seldom, if ever, shown during actual live conversation?
Until recently, I too would have thought it absurd to voice such fears about the marvellous technological revolution which has come to us, not just since the invention of the internet, but even more recently, by the enhancement that is called Web 2.0.
For those unfamiliar with such terms, Web 2.0 is the name given by the computer industry to the "second generation" of the internet that has now been made widely available and affordable by high speed broadband connections.
Such is the capability of Web 2.0 that it makes all kinds of information available instantaneously at the click of a mouse, and enables entire books, films and albums to be downloaded to your desktop.
It can be a wonderful thing to use. I have myself been seduced by the ease, and the interest, of using Google and Wikipedia (the popular online encyclopaedia) to check facts in seconds which would formerly have required a wearisome journey to a library or would simply have been inaccessible. Nothing wrong with that, surely?
And isn’t it simply fuddy-duddy to say that young people should not have access to an enormous range of knowledge and experience at the tap of a lap-top key, or to build up friendships through "social networking" sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace?
Until recently, I would certainly have agreed the web evangelists: Let Freedom Reign! Yes, there may be a lot of drivel out there, but, with judicious parental supervision, surely the world of the internet creates untold opportunities for everyone - including our children - to inform, entertain and delight themselves.
Yet two things have made me change my mind. The first was the speech given recently by Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, in which he outlined the company’s plans for the future.
Not content with becoming the world’s dominant internet search engine, he revealed that Google hoped to acquire a mass of personal information about each of its regular users, to the extent that it will one day be able to tell people how they should conduct almost every aspect of their lives.
"The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'" said Mr Schmidt.
For anyone who cares about personal liberties and privacy, this is a truly terrifying prospect. But if you think that, then you should also read - as I did this week - a staggering new book with the title The Cult Of The Amateur by Andrew Keen.
He is an English-born digital media entrepreneur and Silicon Valley insider who really knows his stuff. And he writes with the passion of a man who can at last see the dangers he has helped unleash.
His book will come as a real shock to many. It certainly did to me.
Let us concentrate first on Keen’s assertion that the innocent use of the worldwide web as a source of knowledge has blurred any distinction between truth and falsehood.
Wikipedia was started by a clever man called Jimmy Wales. I have often used it, being too lazy even to tap the few extra digits to read a proper online encyclopaedia such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I had never realised until reading Keen’s book that any amateur can write an entry in Wikipedia.
What is more, if you don’t like an entry, you can "correct" it, whether what you write is true or false. As a result, Wikipedia is now insidiously crammed with misinformation, much of it planted by special interest groups or malign individuals with axes to grind.
Yet it is also the 17th most accessed site on the internet. Encyclopaedia Britannica, with 100 Nobel prize-winners, 4,000 expert contributors, and its strict code of accuracy and objectivity, is ranked 5,128.
The result? Error-crammed and often biased Wikipedia, which pays for none of its contributions and employs only a handful of staff, is going from strength to strength. Meanwhile, Britannica has had to halve its 300 or so staff in the U.S.
But as I now know, it’s not just Wikipedia that is deeply flawed. A great deal of web content is not at all what it seems. What passes for "amateur" contribution is often, in fact, professional advertising, or political or other propaganda.
To take just one small example from Keen’s book: on the fantastically popular videoclip-sharing site called YouTube, a short film was posted last August. It purported to be a rap video called Tea Party.
But it wasn’t a simple homeshot-video like the ones that normally fill the site. It was, in fact, paid for by Smirnoff to advertise their new product Raw Tea, yet nowhere was this fact mentioned. The company instead hoped to market its product by stealth. Another YouTube success, lonelygirl15, purports to be a selfmade videoblog detailing the life of an angst-ridden teenager. It is, in fact, cheaply but commercially made, with a twenty-something Australian actress called Jessica simply playing out a story that is every bit as fictional as any of the TV soaps.
The project turned out to be the brainchild of two Californian filmmakers, pioneering a new form of "viral broadcasting" which they hoped might generate sufficient hype to attract mainstream advertising. The ploy has worked. The videoblog now attracts more than 11 million viewers, and makes money through advertising, product placement deals and donations from fans.
"So what?" you might say. "Does any of this really matter?" I believe it matters very much, because this was another example of falsehood masquerading as truth.
I have only just scratched the surface of Keen’s examples, but already we have an encyclopaedia which purveys falsehood easily outstripping one which is totally reliable. We have cunningly planted advertising masquerading as music videos, and true confessions turning out to be acting.
Magnified across the whole sprawl of the Internet, it is easy to see how truth itself has been made cheap by Web 2.0. And this is just the start of the problem.
If civilised life, and our shared perception of goodness, depends on keeping the division very sharp between truth and falsehood, then it also, surely, depends upon an idea of ownership. You don’t pinch other people’s property.
Yet teachers in schools, colleges and universities have noted a terrifying rise in what used to be called cheating - with vast screeds of students’ coursework often lifted wholesale from the internet (though much of the material is often riddled with factual errors). This habit of mind - "If it’s online, it’s free" - extends to films and music, too.
The strongest point made here by Keen is that any film or music made by amateurs is very unlikely to be as good as that which has been put together by experts in a recording studio. Yet the web is actually destroying the professionalism and talent of true stars by undermining the industry that supports them.
The habit of illegally downloading music on to iPods - which is piracy or theft when you do it to a commercially marketed piece of music - has not only led to the financial collapse of many record labels, it also imperils the whole creative process.
The result? According to one veteran producer, Alan Parsons: "The glory days of selling epoch-making albums like Abbey Road or Dark Side Of The Moon are over."
It’s the same in the movie business, with Paramount, Walt Disney and Warner Bros all cutting the number of films made and creating huge redundancies in the industry, because their revenue from DVDs is plummeting.
Disney's sales went down by an astounding $1.5 billion to $962 million in two years, 2003 to 2005. The main reason? The evolution of Web 2.0 had destroyed their market by enabling films to be downloaded and shared illegally.
In other words, by pirating old movies and classic albums from illegal file-sharing websites, the young are guaranteeing there will be less and less money for new films and new music - in fact, they are causing the deaths of these industries.
Add to this the dark side of Web 2.0, which has enabled gambling and porn websites to expand exponentially, and you can see that what is taking place is not just regrettable, it is dangerous.
A recent study by Dr Nancy Petry, an expert on online gambling at the University of Connecticut Health Center, says 65 per cent of internet gamblers are pathologically addicted, and that internet gamblers are "far more likely to be addicted to gambling behaviour than those who frequent real-world casinos".
Why? Because you can play online poker all day, every day in your own home, as many students now do. "It fried my brain," confessed a kid from Florida who lost a quarter of a million dollars. Such sums, as Keen’s book shows, are not unusual.
Keen also demolishes the idea - which I had held in my ignorance - that online porn was mainly for sad old men. Among the examples he gives, the one that chilled me most was this 13-year old, named Z, being interviewed on an online "sex magazine" called Nerve:
Interviewer: "Have you ever seen any pornography on the internet?"
Z: "Obviously." Interviewer: "How old were you when you first saw porn?"
Z: "I guess ten, but that was because they were, like advertisements, s*** like that."
Interviewer: "Do you know anyone who’s really into internet porn?"
Z: "Basically all my friends are." Interviewer: "Are you?" Z: "Yeah. I’m not like ashamed to say that. Most of the time my friends look at it, it’s not like, 'Oh my God that’s so hot.' It’s like, 'Yeah, that’s all right.' I like gothic porn."
As Keen says: "Thirteen-year-olds should be playing football or riding bikes, not sitting in locked bedrooms looking at hard-core pornography.
The internet is transforming future generations into a nation of kids so inundated by and desensitised to hard-core smut that they’ve even developed favourite genres."
So, the internet has led to a fall in academic standards, the collapse of the music and movie industries; it has turned a whole generation into potential gambling and pornography addicts (with calamitous consequences). And that’s before we even delve into the risks of private information such as health records or bank details being stolen online by hackers.
Less dramatic than this, but equally pernicious in my view, is the simple intrusiveness of the internet. You think it is you using It. But Keen has made me realise it is always the other way around.
Every time you make a search on Google or Yahoo, they clock your area of interest. They are building up a profile of you. "You see," Keen writes, "the more information they possess about us - our hobbies, our tastes and our desires - the more information they can sell to advertisers and marketers, allowing them to better personalise their products, pitches and approaches.
"But our information is not to advertisers alone. Everyone from hackers and cyber thieves to state and federal officials can potentially find out anything from the last movie ticket we bought to the prescription medications we’re taking or the balance of our savings account."
This is an absolutely terrifying picture. What in hell - and I choose the words very carefully - have we all got ourselves into?
A purgatory is something from which you can get out. A hell is not. And although he advocates a judicious supervision of your child’s internet use and a sensible approach to the whole matter, Keen leaves me very uneasy indeed. Has not this revolution in fact pitchforked us all into a nightmare from which no escape is possible?
•The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture And Assaulting Our Economy, by Andrew Keen is published by Nicholas Brearley at £12.99. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0870 161 0870.
The internet is probably twice as destructive as it is beneficial. But unfortunately, the benefits are of the kind that we cannot live without, these days.
We’re Doomed as doomed can be.
And Al Gore invented the Internet. Let’s arrest him.
Can we lynch Algore for inventing it?
Only if you see these intrinsicly opposed concepts. Sometimes destruction is good. I for one am enjoying the breakdown of the mainstream media monoliths.
I just saw the same movie for the third time tonight. I buy CDs, as well as LPs. I’m no danger for people missing out on my money.
weer domed
Exactly!
Of course people can and do correct the "corrections" too.
This guy, the author, uses way to many commas, in stating his case.
Luddites
Such wonderful logic hasn’t been seen since since the days when Ned Ludd lead his followers to destroy weaving looms. Perhaps it rivals the days when Menno Simons forms the Mennonite sect, or Jacob Amman refined the Mennonites to become the Amish.
I’m sure the same was said about printed books, records, movies, radio, television, ...
SoCons have been saying this for years. Maybe people are starting to listen.
The elites have lost control...between the net and talk radio...LOL...the pions are winning...on top of that we're seeing how nutty the left really is...
I think there were similar observations when the Industrial Revolution began.
LOL--You beat me to it. My exact thought.
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