I came across a post today that Clay Shirky did at Corante’s Many2Many blog, which I have skimmed but haven’t read in its entirety — in part because it is really long :-) It’s also rather dense and well thought-out, as much of Clay’s stuff is, and I want to go back and read it more closely when I get a chance. In a nutshell, he is responding to a post by Michael Gorman at the Encyclopedia Britannica blog, which I gather is hosting a sort of online salon of some kind devoted to exploring the idea of Web 2.0.

Gorman’s post is a relatively long treatise on the shortcomings of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, looking at how it cheapens social discourse and results in a “flight from expertise” (much like Andrew Keen’s “cult of the amateur” — and Keen also shows up in the Britannica salon, as does Nick Carr). I’m going to go back and read Gorman’s post as well in more depth, but if this kind of thing interests you at all, they’re probably both worth a read.

Update:

Free Range Librarian takes some well-deserved shots at Gorman here, and accuses Britannica of hyping up his criticisms in an attempt to boost traffic (people do that on the Web? surely not), and Seth Finkelstein agrees that it smells like high-brow linkbait.

Aaron Swartz is an interesting guy. One of the co-founders of Reddit, the Digg-like recommendation engine that was recently bought by the Conde Nast magazine-publishing empire, his blog often has long and thoughtful posts with a refreshingly different perspective. His latest is no exception: In a post entitled “Everything Good is Bad For You,” he writes about what he sees as the downside of Web services like Twitter, and even Reddit itself.

After Reddit became popular, Aaron says, people came up to him and said how much they enjoyed using it, but also talked about how it had destroyed their productivity and consumed their lives. Many people have said the same about YouTube or MySpace or Facebook — and how they spend all their time updating their profile or checking their friend requests or scanning for pictures — and Twitter.com is the latest addition to the family of time-wasting, attention-destroying applications, Aaron suggests. He quotes Cory Doctorow as saying: “It’s like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate.” Aaron argues that Reddit and Twitter and other tools are the equivalent of chocolate bars.

Peter Caputa at pc4media makes an even stronger argument, saying the tech blogosphere is “just a bunch of surface skimming idiots in a bar w/ no alcohol, and that it’s “mostly Michael Arrington’s fault.” At some point, he says, companies have to “gaze beyond your own navel and come up with a business model; an application that connects people in meaningful ways to accomplish goals beyond instant self-gratification.”

I think Aaron and Peter are both right, in a sense. It’s easy to get consumed by things like Twitter or Facebook or even instant messaging for that matter, and they are a little like junk food — fast, sugar high, illusion of being full, etc. And yet, I can’t agree completely. Why? As a commenter notes on Aaron’s blog, a lot of novels are crap too, and probably just as bad for you (don’t get me started on television). Is reading a blog any worse than reading a potboiler detective novel? I don’t know, but it’s a pretty close race.

In the end, I think a lot of the things we’re seeing are experiments, and no one really knows whether they will actually be useful or not, or what they really *mean* in the larger sense. I do know that things like Twitter and Facebook and MySpace connect people in ways that novels do not — I’m not saying that’s necessarily better. Just saying.

Sure, Second Life has its weird side — what with spiky-haired avatars wielding swords in cellphone stores and whatnot — but it has a serious side too. There are conferences, for example, held by prestigious groups such as the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard. And increasingly, educators are using it as a tool to assist them in reaching new audiences and teaching in new ways (pdf link).

In a recent post, Rebecca McKinnon — a research fellow at the Berkman Center and former TV journalist who co-founded Global Voices Online — mentioned that she has gotten involved in Second Life in order to take part in an educational exercise set up by Charles Nesson, founder of the Berkman Center : a class called Law in the Court of Public Opinion. Rebecca has some interesting thoughts about how Second Life reflects some of the world’s existing prejudices, despite the fact that there are very few boundaries the way there are in RL (real life).

Update:

Henry Jenkins, the director of the comparative media program at MIT, has a (rather lengthy) excerpt from the thesis written by one of his students, Ilya Vedrashko, which is well worth reading. It’s about the evolution of the relationship between advertising and games, including Second Life. The complete thesis is available in PDF format from Mr. Vedrashko’s website here.