Thanks to Antonio Roversi I just came across an interesting piece about Web 2.0 by Nicholas Carr which has attracted a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere (his piece is 2,500 words and the comments stretch for another 12,000 words - not counting 322 people so far who have discussed it on their own blogs). I won’t attempt to summarise it yet again but I encourage you to read it, though the author is occasionally as exaggerated in his "contrarian" rhetoric as the techno-utopians he criticises - eg:

Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die.

I think he’s right to point out the dangers but this is a little too apocalyptic. That said, his conclusion is spot on:

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral… it doesn’t care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let’s can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

I consider my own research as an extension of this - one of my more ambitious objectives is to look dispassionately at personal weblogging and to ask:

Is personal blogging really a liberatory technology (as almost all the scholars studying it seem to maintain) or is it just a potentially liberatory tool. If it is beneficial, for whom is it and how? And given the negative consequences of its use, what can we say about the net effect on society?

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