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When you have phenomena such as the Internet and Web 2.0 the naysayers are bound to gather and get an audience, and that's now happening.
One who is already picking up notice for a stream of recent comments and interviews is Andrew Keen, whose book The Cult of the Amateur is due to be published this June. Simply put, he doesn't believe the hype of Web 2.0 and thinks the proliferation of blogs, wikis and other effects of online social networking -- the engine of Web 2.0 -- are leading us into mediocrity.
It's not a new take on the Internet, and it's arguable that Keen isn't slinging mud against a barn door that's already closed. But his comments will resonate with quite a few folks in the medical community who are suspicious for a number of reasons about the latest Internet hype.
In a recent commentary in a Britannica blog, for example, he bemoans Web 2.0s push on all things collaboratory:
But the real consequence – unintended or otherwise – of Silicon Valley’s “participatory†media revolution is a culture of digital narcissicism in which our most meaningful cultural reference is ourself. Today, on the tenth anniversary of the blog, media is turning into a mirror. Everywhere we look, we are faced with 70 million versions of ourselves: our own electronic diaries, our own half-informed opinions, our own stupidity and ignorance. This antisocial outcome of the social software revolution will be the reverse of the nightmare in George Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-four. Big Brother — what Silicon Valley idealists eulogize as “citizen media†— is turning out to be ourselves.
He's talking about newspapers, radio and TV and what the impact on "mainstream media" will be of the army of so-called citizen journalists that the new Web is supposed to unleash. But the question is also relevant to medicine, in that the new consumer-oriented sites such as Revolution Health threaten to replace the wisdom of the physician expert with the more enlightened prodding of the great unwashed.
The fact is that the "blogosphere" is a pervasive part of modern life and will only get more so with the advent of other Web 2.0 tools. As reports like these show, the numbers alone make that inevitable.
However, as far as REAL influences of the Web are concerned there are also regular examples of the meaningful impact it can have on the lives of those that depend on medicine daily. This story about a relatively cheap way of using the Web to remind people to take their pills is the kind of reality-based Internet tool that still holds out hope for the electronic age.
And then there's the stories that just make it a pleasure to wake up in the morning.
Professors and other readers of medical journals at New York's Stony Brook University recently went on the warpath to save their motherlode of printed knowledge from the scrap heap, as it was threatened with in order to make space for new research initiatives.
Although it wasn't specifically mentioned, the underlying premise is obviously the belief that, with the Internet so widely available, print journals are obsolete. Well, the professors disagreed.
Web junkie though I am, I also like the smell and feel of newsprint in the morning. Long live contradiction!!
By Brian Robinson, GHIT Contributing Writer
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