DISQUS

Adam,

Excellent post -- this sort of context is a great addition to the debate.

Speaking for myself, as both a you- and self-labeled optimist, I'd like to make two observations.

First, you ascribe to the pessimists the view that the internet is "... forcing individuals and industries to completely reconsider the way they live their lives or organize their business affairs." You say that like it's a bad thing.

This sort of re-consideration in light of new capabilities, as wrenching as such a thing can be, has nevertheless historically led to general social improvement (cf. the printing press or steam power). If the generation being disrupted were allowed veto power over novelty, nothing would ever undergo radical change. The fact that there is such a re-consideration, and that it is both widespread and mandatory, is the engine of the positive change that many of the optimists, including me, believe internet adoption will produce.

Second, you are right in noting the obsession with Wikipedia amongst the pessimists. I have a theory as to why that is.

In the 1980s and 1990s, evidence for the viability of open collaboration was mainly confined to free software (later labeled open source.) The main argument against free/open source software was "that can't work", but that argument began to fail with the success of Apache and Linux, and IBM's adoption of same.

At that point (ca. 1998) another excuse was needed, and it was: "Software is special." This argument had several facets: Code is uniquely suited to distributed collaboration, programmers are native to the internet, learning to code creates special social norms, and so on.

This excuse held until about 2004, and the growing general awareness of Wikipedia.

This is why Wikipedia is the object of such fascination and horror -- none of the excuses for ignoring open source software as a special case apply. If Wikipedia works -- which is to say if there is a general-purpose tool that can be used to create a public good of enormous, worldwide value, created by unpaid contributors *who judge their contributions and the results to be worthwhile* (Carr's concern, in particular) -- then nothing is going to hold back the general population from embracing those tools.

And if society tries using these tools, then each pessimist gets treated to their own special vision of the coming horror. Society will engage in exactly the re-consideration you've identified, no matter which experts lose their jobs (Keen), no matter how much it configures the existing social landscape (Siegel, in a reading that waves away the self-absorbtion), and that operates via economics of voluntary association rather than surplus labor value (Carr.)

Oh Prok. We have to stop meeting like this.

I find it hard to understand how you can simultaneously write about the adoption of virtual worlds and be skeptical of non-market economies.

Setting aside the _ad hominem_, your point seems to be that open source and CC-licensed content is doomed to fail. However, since most people aren't paid for their creative participation in online environments, at any level of virtuality, I'm a little curious what you think the "jury" came back with? You seem to be alluding to some body of research or argument that suggests non-market motivations are somehow moot in these environments, but you don't say what it is?

'Clay’s claim, essentially, is that online media are by definition participatory and thus less “brain rotting”. '

That isn't my claim at all. My claim, as I said in the talk, is that doing something is better than doing nothing. Certainly any TV viewing that leads to user action, a la Dan Hill's brilliant 'Why Lost Is Genuinely New Media" essay, but that was not the normal case (though it may become the normal case.)

You ask how many people watched “Cosmos” as children and ended up doing science because of it? My answer is, as a percentage of total viewing audience, almost none.

-clay