February 24, 2007 | In: Education, Internet and Web, Politics and Society, Technology
The Web 2.0 versus authority
Forget experts. Forget doctorate degrees. Forget international recognition. Forget the Nobel Prize. Who needs to uphold some elite group of people as a bastions of knowledge? We have Wikipedia anyway.
This leads me to ask, is the Web 2.0 subliminally killing authority? Now I’m in a quandary. In my previous post, I was thinking that Barthes’ concept is not applicable to the Web. But aren’t we killing authority. In the larger scale that’s what the Web 2.0 is trying to do – to force the collaborative mass effort to be the source of knowledge over that one “expert.” However, don’t the ideas of collaboration and audience feedback acknowledge the existence of the Author?
In my view, the Web 2.0 seems like the great antithesis of the post-war “order.” Fading are the concepts of the “superpowers” and “monopolies.” Enter, the “flattening of the world” concept (courtesy of Thomas Friedman) because of technology.
Time Magazine, itself, veered away from its great man (or woman) way of thinking by citing “YOU” as the Person of the Year for 2006. Well, not necessarily one person, but the great collaboration and participation of web users all over the world known as Web 2.0
But given this stance that we are building the massive virtual repository of man’s knowledge called the Web, where does this leave the academe? Do we still need the universities and laboratories now that we have a greater pool of “scholars” do to the studies for all of us? Or is the Web merely a tool? Or is it the great tome of knowledge that every academician always dreamed about? What is there to gain in a leveling of the academic playing field?
With Wikipedia, the writings of John Doe and J. Fitzgerald Q. Thomson III PhD are more or less equal in the chances of being taken as fact. But John Doe’s articles on Lindsay Lohan will get more readership. While Dr. Thomson’s discourses on the neutrinos will only be read by his fellow geeks.
In fairness, most of the articles on linguistics that I’ve consulted for cursory reading in Wikipedia bear much factual accuracy as compared to those I found in books. And I think it is logical not to compare the articles on Indo-European language families with the articles of Paris Hilton and Ron Jeremy.
Hence, this leads me to believe that we are pushing for a collaborative authorship. Take Wikipedia for example. There you’d get the mix of experts and lay people mashing together ideas to form a product of collaborative efforts that carries the depth of a research complete with the participation first-hand experiences of the masses.
But are the citizens of the Web 2.0 ready for such a phenomenon? Such undertaking entails a great deal of maturity from its participants. And most of the Web users out there don’t exhibit just that. I believe that this is a dangerous (yet exciting) social experiment. Doesn’t this “leveling” bear much semblance to the structures of communism? Paranoia creeps in. Now I ask,is there an iron hand behind all of this and we’re all pawns?
Further Reading:
- Web 2.0 smackdown: intellectuals vs. amateurs in Citizendium
- Social freeloaders: Is there a collective wisdom and can the Web obtain it?
- “Is Wikipedia “knowledge” merely third-party hearsey?”
Personal Take: I’ve been prompted to take a different route of blogging my ideas in the wake of the troll attack I received for my post, Diskurso sa kulturang jologs versus the middle-class mindset ng Pinoy Web 2.0. While the remarks were amusing, it has fueled my drive to focus on the discourse of the Web as a point of study.
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