The new seekers
David Jennings argues that Web 2.0 will enrich our cultural lives immeasurably 1 n Version 2.0 of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith will have a 'preferred customer' gold card for Googlezon, the corporation that results from the merger of the internet giants Google and Amazon.
Google has completed its mission to organise all the world's words, images and sounds and make them easy to find; and, once you've found what you want, Amazon sells it to you. By recording everything you purchase, look for, look at, listen to or read, Googlezon comes to know your tastes better than you yourself do. It serves you a personalised programme of recommendations and targeted promotions, all of these backed up with patented One-Click" ordering. You need never again use your initiative to track down new favourites: the privatised Ministry of Information has anticipated your every need.
This scenario is taken from an eightminute film distributed (via the internet, of course) in 2004 and presenting itself as reportage from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014. It conjures up one of two dystopian visions of our digital future — the one that sees our cultural choices filtered and processed by software algorithms and statistical number-crunching.
The other dystopia owes less to Orwell and more perhaps to the anti-collectivism of Ayn Rand's Anthem. In his recent book, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen paints a picture of what he calls a 'dictatorship of idiots'. His bugbears are not technocrats but sites such as Wikipedia where anyone can edit the record of events and impose their interpretation, regardless of credentials or expertise. Wikipedia is one of the family of online initiatives known as 'Web 2.0': if Version 1 of the web saw the internet primarily as a publishing medium for corporations and advertisers, then this new incarnation is much more participative.
Keen presents a doom-laden prognosis when it comes to the emergence of media that encourage users to contribute comments and ratings, or even to originate their own material on blogs, rather than be merely passive consumers. He stokes the fear that, as tallies of user votes replace expert editorial selections, the media ecosystem that fosters and promotes talent will be undermined. The dictatorship of idiots is also a recipe for anarchy, as authoritative guides in traditional mass media are diluted and eroded by a Babel of competing voices on blogs where everyone is 'famous for 15 people'.
But is this simply tilting at windmills? After all, we don't need our cultural lives to be run like a government, and many of us positively welcome the unpredictability of stumbling upon new, exciting and perhaps as yet untamed artists. Anarchy is not synonymous with chaos — many of nature's most complex and stable systems could be said to be anarchic. On the contrary, it embraces influence and leadership, if not regulation. Order emerges from disorder and diversity by evolution, and the central innovation and beauty of the Web 2.0 family of technologies is that they find ways to harness and accelerate this emergence, digitising Babel so that it can be processed, distilled and structured.
What is more, one of the obligations inherent in anarchy is that people have to do more for themselves. Web 2.0 is not just another way of serving up a cultural menu to guide consumption in the way that a TV network controller or radio playlister might do. It's best understood as a self-service environment dotted with many different clues to steer you in the direction of things that might interest you. Of course it is true that self-service leaves greater scope for making dumb decisions (though there are Web 2.0 equivalents of nanny guidance and stabiliser wheels for those deemed to need them). But it does not mean dumbing down across the board.
Discovery itself is an anarchic and unruly activity: it loves to slip through cracks, disappearing down rabbit holes and making associative leaps between material that may not at first appear to be connected. We all know the pleasure of arriving at the work of a new favourite author, composer or film-maker via what seems an incredibly circuitous path or a chance mention from a friend. It is our natural inquisitiveness that leads us to root out these new discoveries, foraging in the areas that appear most fertile in terms of our tastes.
And it's the self-directed, unpredictable, anarchic nature of such explorations that will stymie any Big Brother-type ambitions that may underpin Google and Amazon's personalised services. Certainly, as so many of our choices and activities are recorded, there will be plenty of legitimate concerns about privacy of personal data. One of the things Web 2.0 is doing is renegotiating the contract between media businesses and audience to take it beyond simple payment for goods and services. Since 'attention profiling' data is so valuable to those who have something to sell, audiences will be given better offers in return for details about what they listen to, watch, rate and classify. This data will be used to help them make discoveries that match their interests, and sometimes it will be used for targeted advertising. Often it will be difficult to tell the two apart. Which is why audiences of the future, increasingly wise to these techniques and the new media environment, will take them all with a pinch of salt.
No matter how much the new generation of intermediaries between goods and consumers seek to refine their recommendations, they will not be able to dictate our cultural agendas, collectively or individually. On the contrary: the way the internet works today increases the scope for making discoveries in different ways. We can try out pieces of music and trailers for film and television programmes; we follow links from the familiar to the unfamiliar via critical reviews and reference sites; and we are often swayed by word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, community sites (such as Facebook and MySpace) and blogs. In this context, the prompts and nudges from the likes of Googlezon are merely more grist to the mill.
Far from herding us all in one direction, the ultimate value of these nudges may be that they bring into view — when relevant to individual tastes — the more obscure margins of our culture that have historically been overlooked by all but tiny minorities. This is the thesis known as 'the long tail' outlined by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name, which involves expanding markets by selling less of more. Each marginal item, in the 'tail' of the charts, individually sells in low volumes, but the cumulative effect of these items may account for a surprisingly large proportion of overall revenues.
In the old market of records and videocassettes, and limited choice of TV and radio channels, media producers wanted everyone to want the same thing, because that made distribution easier and maximised profits. In the age of infinite choice they have come to realise that the best way to get us excited is to tap our latent desire for myriad different things — and with digital distribution they can meet that demand without sacrificing their margins.
The culture we choose to explore makes us who we are. So we should care deeply about the means available to discover new work. It's fair to say that much of Web 2.0 is still a work in progress. But it offers the promise of reconciling the vested interests of creators and distributors with the free expression of different audiences. Discovery can become even more exciting and enriching, charting a course that steers well clear of either cultural totalitarianism or chaos.
David Jennings is author of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll: How Digital Discovery Works and What It Means for Consumers, Creators and Culture (Nicholas Brealey Publishing).
Previous page
