Just a Few Things

Just finished reading the "The amorality of Web 2.0" post on Rough Type. A strange post and I don't think it really hung together, but then again what can you expect from blog posts. Personally, I strongly disagree with him on the amoral point, which, given his final paragraph, may have been his primary point. Notions of community, equality, and expression are not only concepts heavily value laden, but also very much a part of our society beyond and before the web. We live in a participatory democracy, a system founded in these ideas, it would seem the very definition of hypocrisy to suggest that we would not hold them in the highest esteem. True the web is "just happening", but it's happening because it allows us to tap into and further many of our core ideals.

On a very different note, I found what he had to say about the coexistence of the blog and traditional media interesting. Not interesting because of what he was saying about media, but because of how it seems that the same might also apply to the conflict between libraries and bookstores. Often the suggested solution seems to be to alter the library to emulate the bookstore. This seems like no better an idea then the suggestion the New York Times should cede the mantel of journalism to the bloggers. In both cases overlap may exist, but in neither case is their an excuse for the extinction of either.