Bloggers - supermozaus or self -love of the crowd?
Which of the candidates for the president of the United States “owns” the Internet - Barack Obama or John McCain? According to Attributor Corporation, which is engaged in measuring the popularity of candidates in the Internet, websites dedicated to both one and the other candidate are now fixing approximately the same number of views: 38 million pages a month about Obama and 36 million-about mackeyin. What role do blogs play in politics? The New Times addressed this issue to the famous criticism of the blogosphere Andrew Khnu, the author of the book “The Cult of the Lovenger. Like blogs, Myspace, YouTube and other modern “folk media” destroy our economy, our culture and our values ”
Abama is twice as much as McCain among bloggers (13 million versus 7 million), but loses on traditional news sites (12 million versus 25 million). At the same time, two months ago, Obama’s dominance on blogs was even more pronounced. Why?
“The most important change was the appearance of Sarah Palin,” says Andrew Kin. - She symbolizes the parish of the “fan of amateur” into the political sphere. The voters were indifferent to the fact that she had no experience in politics. It is also not surprising that the McCain -Paline couple catch up with Obama in popularity on the Internet. "The cult of an amateur" is a social and cultural phenomenon. "
Web 2.0
Andrew Kin set himself the goal of “exposing” the negative aspects of the Internet culture associated with the so-called Web 2.0-the ideology of the Internet use, in which its content is created not by professionals (writers, scientists, journalists, filmmakers), but by the masses of cooperative amateur bloggers who break the boundaries between manufacturers and consumers of information.
This term is widespread in 2004, when the publisher of books on programming Tim O'rali began to use it. The Web 2.0 term was created to distinguish the blogosphere and other similar services from the 90s era (Web 1.0), when users visited websites passively without participating in a change in the content of the site. Tim O'rali brought religious significance to Web 2.0, comparing it with the idea of the “collective consciousness” of the New Age movement (“New Age”), popular with the hippies of the 70s: “Modern Internet is an echo that we talked about in Esalem (headquarters of the New Age.-The New Times), but we did not know what happened to this through technology. "
Down with expert tyranny?
Before becoming a critic of Web 2.0, Andrew Kin was not a newcomer on the Internet. In the late 90s, he was the founder of one of the early dot-comments of 1 Silicon Valley related to the transfer of music via the Internet. Therefore, Andrew Kin in 2004 turned out to be one of the two hundred invited to the meeting of O'Reili Friends in the forest north of San Francisco. The ideologists of the “rally” announced that they want to save society from “expert tyrannia”, which were proposed to replace “noble amateurs” 2 , collectively (and free) producing reports, encyclopedias, software, books and films for other “noble amateurs”, without intermediaries in the form of magazines and film studios. The idea of free sounded especially ironic on behalf of the multimillionaire Tim O'rali and other wealthy participants in the Pioneer camp.
Andrew Kin decided that he did not want to participate in the creation of a "marvelous new world" 3 , which will consist of several Internet-multimilliarders and millions of amateur writers who write worriedly. He called Web 2.0 "The place in which ignorance, selfishness, bad taste and law of the crowd converge together."
Crooked space
Why do Web 2.0 technologies indulge lovers? Andrew Keen believes that among the main factors “curving” the space of the blogosphere, are the algorithms of the work of search engines, primarily Google (and in Russia “Yandex”). The early search engines of the early 90s were looking for information only by keywords. As a result, if a person was looking for, for example, about “synchrophasotron”, instead of a website of the high energies laboratory in Dubna, he could get to the site with Alla Pugacheva’s song “either more”, which mentions synchrofazotron. More advanced search engines of the late 90s began to take into account the history of their predecessors. For example, if a thousand users, when searching for the word “synchophasotron”, clicked to the laboratory link in Dubna and only ten clicked on the link about the song, then for the next user the link about Dubna will be in the list of links much higher than the link about Pugachev.
Unfortunately, this improvement has the opposite side. When millions of users click on links that other millions of users clicked before them, the search engine begins to give answers that the “middle resident of the Earth” liked. This makes an important but unpopular information inaccessible - it simply will never rise to the first page of the search results. The advantage is gained by popular sites that do not necessarily contain reliable and truthful information. Andrew Kin calls this effect “the wisdom of the crowd” and claims that because of it, many Internet users begin to consider the truth simply what the majority believes in. This causes “information wars” when each side is trying to manipulate information on the Internet, giving links to “its own” version of the truth in order to raise its rating in search engines and make it “the main truth”.
The phenomena described by Andrew Keen are even more expressed in the Russian -speaking blogosphere, in which there are few serious materials (for example, about science or art) and many endless collective wars of opinions, links and comments. In addition, the researcher of the Living Journal Evgeny Gorny from Oxford believes that Russian bloggers closed on themselves and missed the possibility of integration through the English -speaking blogosphere into international culture. He compares Russian bloggers with a tribe of Indianschones who ate the horses presented by him, not realizing that the horses are intended for driving. “The Russians ate a“ live magazine, ”Yevgeny Gorny jokes in his analysis.
The state can also intervene in the movement of the crowd. According to Andrew Kin, “if the authoritarian regime of China (or Russia) will take into account the ubiquitous search engine like Google or Baidu, the consequences for the truth will be very alarming. Google is already engaged in self -censorship in China, performing dirty work for an authoritarian government, because it needs income from a huge Chinese market. ”
Blogs VS Journalism
The search for truth based on the popularity of opinions has nothing to do with how professional journalists work in democratic countries who try to stay on objective reality, because otherwise they risk their reputation. Unfortunately, due to the Internet revolution, the circulations of newspapers and magazines are falling: for example, in 2005 only the Los Angeles Times has fallen by 18%. The fall of circulations means not only the dismissal of journalists. As the editor of San Francisco Chronicle El Saratsevich says, newspapers differ from bloggers in that they are responsible for their words, and therefore they are constantly being judged. Newspapers need money to pay for lawyers, therefore, newspapers without money cannot be independent.
At the same time, according to Andrew the film, it is almost impossible to earn a living with the help of a blog. Venturen capitalist Guy Kavasaki is one of the 50 most popular bloggers in the world. Despite the fact that during 2006 more than two and a half million people visited his blog, the blog advertising brought Gay Kavasaki only $ 3350, which is not enough for a professional journalist. Thus, Web 2.0 “eats” the traditional media, not offering in return for a new way of mining high -quality information.
Intelligence officers
Although Web 2.0 could not replace professional journalism, the blogosphere has found unexpected use in the CIA. According to the article in The New York Times, published in 2006, the internal network of American intelligence services called Intelink used outdated information search technologies for a long time. Because of this, the network, created back in 1994, was not able to help prevent the attack on September 11, 2001, although all the information (for example, about training aircraft) was known, but was stored in different places of the network. One of the initiators of the introduction of modern search and blogs on Intelink was a young military intelligence officer Matthew Barton, who specialized in the study of Russian politics. When Barton read the Ukrainian blogosphere during the Orange Revolution, he was impressed with what speed the bloggers reacted to new events. At first, one blogger found an interesting fact, the other noticed it, putting a link and attaching a comment, the third compared with a different fact of a well -known fact - and interesting information wrapped around the blogosphere, spreading out of comparisons and comments along the way. Barton and his colleagues came to the conclusion that a large number of ordinary “reconnaissance bloggers” on the Intelink network will find interesting information faster than a bunch of experts working in isolation. On the other hand, the information leaders of the special services William Spasfending and the Dawns indicated that the “reconnaissancebloggers” are good for finding potential threats, but not for their analysis, since thousands of bloggers can simultaneously put a link to a message containing false information.
Cultural Apocalypse?
What does Andrew Kin offer? To come to terms with the inevitability of a cultural catastrophe? Optional. Andrew Kin emphasizes that he does not oppose the technology, but against the ideology of replacing professionals with a large number of fans. As a positive example of “peaceful coexistence”, Kin cites the British newspaper Guardian, which was able to conduct effective online business and integration with the blogosphere without reducing the quality of reports. And on September 16, an attempt to reconcile the traditional media and the blogosphere was carried out by the Russian company Soup, which owns both the Living Journal and the Internet media Gazeta.ru. From now on, the Gazeta.ru editors will use fragments of the most interesting posts of bloggers of the Living Journal in their publications. Experiments with information continue. How will it end?
Andrew Kin studied at the University of London, the University of Sarajevo and the University of California in Berkeley. One of the pioneers of Silicon Valley, investing in new Internet projects. Acts as an Internet expert on CNN, BBC, Fox News. Columonist The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes.
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1 A DOT-COM Company, or DOT-COM-a company in the field of Internet business, whose website usually uses the popular COM domain-from the word comercial.
2 refers to the image of a “noble savage”, popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
3 “The Word New World” (Brave New World) - anti -utopia of Oldos Huxley.
Political blog • New Times • RIMA — Russian Independent Media Archive
