No really, is it all great? (day 225)

I'm slightly stunned that I haven't posted since Wednesday.  I had a late night Thursday and by Friday evening the virus had made a slight comeback, a warning that rest was a priority.  We have family visiting this weekend too so making sure I could be fit enough to entertain was important.  Like being out of town, being sick is about a 25% drag on an otherwise normal day. 

I've been thinking about Web 2.0 since listening to the Jaron Lanier book and also talking to people about it to see if some of the ideas resonate.  There haven't been many takers so far although it's entirely possible I'm not doing a great job explaining the ideas.  Plus there are so many ideas in the book that it's hard to summarize.  Either way, I've been trying to take a more objective look at what I think about Web 2.0.  One of the side effects of listening to his book has been a sort of permission to be more critical of the social web and hive mentality.  Do I really enjoy all this social networking or am I doing it because I feel I have to?  Jaron is particularly concerned with younger people who are slaves to their online identity which is different but entangled with their offline one.  He claims the most successful people are the one who view their online identity as a fabrication (creation?) and groom it as such.  In any case, there is maintenance needed on online identities and there are potentially many that require maintenance and perhaps concordance.  I've recently taken a break from twitter and I felt a decrease in stress from it.  I've not been updating my Facebook identity as much lately either, partially because I've been a bit disenchanted with the less personal feel of FB and the constant barrage of Farmville or Cafe World announcements.  On the whole I can't say I'm particularly enthused about social networking sites and I miss the personal style of web pages of yore (at least the ones that were updated regularly).  The comments on YouTube and most news sites are very discouraging and routinely make me lose heart in humanity but so does Sarah Palin having supporters for a White House bid.   These are merely side effects of the presence of ignorance in the world but I'm sure that the amplification of that signal does not help.  Jaron speaks about this trolling kind of behaviour and claims it is due to the level of anonymity that's allowed (and prized) on the web.   Whatever it is, it's pervasive and sometimes feels like walking down a dark downtown street at 3am, weaving around drunk, collectively stupid teenagers.  The question that Jaron is asking seems to be "have we backed ourselves into a corner?"  It is possible that the directions taken by Google, Facebook, Apple and other big players may be de-emphasizing the better parts of human nature by devaluing original content and making a business model so dependent on ads.  Are we indeed eating our own long tail?  In a world where physical labour will be increasingly done by robots, the world of ideas and creativity should be gaining importance, not losing.  I would say it's more common for people to view the web as a place to be entertained than to create.  We rehash more than we hash.  And I agree with Jaron, this is a worrying trend.

Next up, some thinking about how it might be different.

A song for this post.