#4 An Internet fed mostly by amateurs is frightening

MercuryNews.com | 10/24/2005 | An Internet fed mostly by amateurs is frightening

An Internet fed mostly by amateurs is frightening

By Mike Langberg

Mercury News

Silicon Valley has its share of would-be utopians. Along with others around the world, they are working overtime to build an online community where the Internet makes everyone equal.

But what if this movement ends up doing more harm than good?

This provocative question is posed by Nicholas G. Carr, an author best known for a controversial 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review arguing that computer technology is so widespread it no longer gives companies a competitive advantage.

Carr kicked off another debate Oct. 3 when he posted an article on his blog, Rough Type (www.roughtype.com), titled ``The amorality of Web 2.0.''

Web 2.0 is a buzz word representing the increasingly popular notion of a new generation of bottom-up Web services.

Blogs, for example, are touted as a way for people outside of government and media to influence public policy. Automated recommendations for books, music and movies are based on the preferences of people like you, rather than the opinions of experienced critics.

Carr, who lives in Carlisle, Mass., regards Web 2.0 as amoral in the sense that Internet is neither a force for good nor evil -- it's only what we make it. That's not a view shared by Web 2.0 true believers.

``From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing,'' Carr writes. Believers envision a cyberworld ``that frees us from traditional constraints on our intelligence, our communities, our meager physical selves.''

But the first burst of Web utopianism didn't pan out, he continues. ``The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. . . . The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us.''

If the first round was what Carr calls ``spiritual vapor,'' the ``hyper-hyped upgrade'' of Web 2.0 doesn't look much better.

``The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional,'' he declares.

Carr's primary example is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), the free Web encyclopedia created by volunteers, with no restriction on who can submit or revise an entry.

``In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing,'' Carr writes.

``In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful -- I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling.''

As examples, Carr points out two biographical entries in Wikipedia -- for Bill Gates and Jane Fonda -- that were incoherent and dubious. (The entries have since been upgraded.)

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the informal leader of the Wikipedia community, conceded the point in several messages sent through the Wikipedia mailing list on Oct. 6 and 7 -- although Wales also made it clear he disagrees with many of Carr's ideas.

The entries on Bill Gates and Jane Fonda, Wales said, ``are, quite frankly, a horrific embarrassment.''

Wales continued, repeating a point he's made often: ``I will never accept that we should use freeness as an excuse. . . . We need to take a serious look at why some high-profile articles are delightful, and some are horrible.''

Carr added some perspective last week by proposing what he called the Law of the Wiki: ``Output quality declines as the number of contributors increases. Making matters worse, the best contributors will tend to become more and more alienated as they watch their work get mucked up by the knuckleheads, and they'll eventually stop contributing altogether, leading to a further fall in quality.''

I'm very much on Carr's side of the fence. I don't want to read blogs by political extremists, listen to podcasts recorded by droning amateurs, or watch videos produced by talentless would-be directors -- even though the Internet makes all that possible.

I want to get my news from highly skilled professionals, listen to music by the world's most brilliant performers and composers, and be entertained by big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas.

Of course, I'm biased. I make my living writing this column, and my paycheck is threatened if everyone decides freely available blogs -- even at lesser quality -- are an acceptable substitute.

Carr concludes: ``The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.''

Amen.