Too much excitement over citizen media?
Keen, who works in technology, thinks that if web 2.0 continues to grow, newspapers will collapse under online advertising and users will edit news sites as they now edit Wikipedia. He sees networking sites like MySpace as places for like-minded people to stick together and confirm their own likes and desires, not to network with those with different views.
“It's hard to be good at what you're doing, it requires expertise,” says Keen. “In the same way that not everyone should be doctors or teachers or astronauts, not everyone should be an author. Most people do not have anything interesting to say.”
Blogger Jeff Jarvis disagrees, saying, “In web 2.0, Keen sees the means of flattening culture. I see the means of the people speaking.”
Poynter Online’s Matthew Buckman agrees that traditional media should keep an eye on citizen media, but doesn’t web 2.0 will take over media entirely. Traditional media, he says, offers jobs with regular, definite salaries: a large incentive to produce quality content.
“But I do however believe the two (traditional media and citizen media) will coexist as different information forms,” says Buckman. “As the Internet matures, there will be more blog aggregators, Googles, Technoratis and other tools which will be able to discern the authoritative from the trivial.”
Source: Poynter Online, The Observer through Media Guardian
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It's the Daily *Mirror*
I think in some ways what you are seeing is a typical generational assault on the "expert" and "professionalism" which is typical and good in a democracy.
People get tired of it after awhile and it flattens out but the result is some renewal in the expert and professional class.
Most things on the internet are going to look
ridiculous in five or ten years.
In fact, rather than a massive increase in the "public dialogue" one might find a massive disillusionment in human nature and how narrow and uninteresting it is.
Just an opinion.
"Poynter Online’s Matthew Buckman agrees that traditional media should keep an eye on citizen media, but doesn’t web 2.0 will take over media entirely. Traditional media, he says, offers jobs with regular, definite salaries: a large incentive to produce quality content."
Buckman fails to realize something: those regular, definite salaries come from advertising. As advertising revenues decline, traditional media cuts those jobs. (See: Times, Los Angeles; Tribune, Chicago; Post, Denver; Tribune, Tampa; Sentinel, Orlando; etc).