Friday, March 21, 2008

Enough with the talk of revolution, already

As an Internet skeptic, it always does my heart good to read pieces like Chris Wilson’s recent Slate article on Wikipedia and Digg and the much-hyped Web 2.0, a supposedly more democratic version of the Web (which, if you remember, was supposed to be a more democratic version of the older media forms it was going to replace.) Wilson points out that about one per cent of Wikipedia users account for over half its edits. As for Digg, turns that that many of its top stories—44 percent in 2007, 56 percent in 2006—were submitted by only 100 people. When the site tried to fiddle with its algorithm, in order to reduce the influence of the top contributors, they threatened to boycott. “Despite the fairy tales about the participatory culture of Web 2.0,” writes Wilson, “direct democracy isn’t feasible at the scale on which these sites operate.”

If I had blogged this entry when it first appeared (which is what I meant to do), I would have ended it about here, with some snide comment to the effect of “how are the cyper-utopians were going to try to spin away Wilson’s claims?” Then I came across a link to another piece by Nicholson Baker, on the manner in which Wikipedia deletes subjects it deems unimportant, and his efforts to protect threatened entries: “I found press citations and argued for keeping the Jitterbug telephone, a large-keyed cell phone with a soft earpiece for elder callers; and Vladimir Narbut, a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police.” Although I’m not always Mr. Baker’s biggest fan, nonetheless his protests against the administrators’ dicta seemed to fit into the general theme I was working on—Wiki as Internet elitism, disguised as Internet egalitarianism. So I googled the article, hoping to find more fodder for my argument. Turns out Baker is not anti-Wiki. The piece begins, in fact, as follows: “Wikipedia is just an incredible thing.” Reviewing a manual by John Broughton on how to make the most of one’s Wikipedia experience, Baker celebrates the democratic feel of the site. That is, democratic in a sort of Bahktinian, medieval carnivalesque sort of way: Wikipedia is, we are told, “fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies.” Baker’s complaints, such as they are (and even he admits that some entries deserve deletion), are made with an eye to getting more participation, so that other folks will join with him, in his defense of the obscure and the trivial.

(Your point being, perfessor?)

(Uh, not much, I guess. Maybe just this:)

The Internet is not inherently democratic: not in its 2.0 version or any version that is likely to appear in our lifetimes. While it may reduce the importance of some forms of social inequality, it builds upon, perhaps even heightens, the importance of others. At the same time, it would be misguided to ignore the ways in which the new media environment has increased the scope for human creativity, and opened up possibilities for human interaction that most of us couldn’t even have imagined as recently as ten years ago. It would be nice to see more media scholars working at the intersection of those two claims.

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