Fine piece by Nicholas Carr on The Amorality of Web 2.0.

Actually, I don't worry much about his main concern that drecky but free amateur content will drive out high quality but professional work -- UNLESS the openness zealots make it impossible for the professionals to get paid for their work, by such means as crippling efforts to defend against piracy.

But it is a risk. As Carr says:

The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. 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. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. 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.

In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.

The comments go on for 30 pages, too.

Carr is the author of Does IT Matter: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage .

posted by James DeLong @ 2:51 PM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines...

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