Wikis

Yesterday evening at the “Towards a social science of web 2.0” conference we witnessed an extremely interesting ‘debate’ between Charles Leadbetter and Andrew Keen; the former advancing a number of arguments that web 2.0, user generated content and open source development are essentially positive and good for the development of knowledge on a number of levels. His arguments were fairly balanced and well structured presenting both how web 2.0 could have both positive and negative effects on quality, democracy and the equality of access to information, especially in the developing world. But it has to be said his argument presented a definite positive outlook.

Andrew Keen was essentially the pantomime villain and played up to the role with a passionate diatribe against user generated content and virtual worlds such as Second Life. His argument was that most of the content created by non-professionals, or amateurs is garbage and not worth paying for and that the availability of this free content will eventually endanger quality content provided by experts that we have traditionally paid for. He also has a big problem with San Francisco “hippy” counterculture and makes the point that while the founders and proponents of the current Web 2.0 phenomenon are essentially against government intervention they are also very pro-market by virtue of their libertarian worldview. His arguments as presented this evening did seem to jump around from one point to another, almost as some sort of taster to the arguments presented in his book which he shamelessly plugged during his speech. I am almost tempted to buy a copy to find out what he was actually trying to say but I’m not sure that I should for fear that I will have fallen into some sort of perverse marketing trap. He did present some interesting and positive opinions on the value of media literacy in response to a question from the audience; in that we need to educate our children on the interpreting of media to discern where there is bias, commercial interest or just plain incompetence.

A good point was made by a fellow delegate while chatting over dinner; that both speakers presented a number of obvious truths amongst their more questionable arguments and so it was fairly difficult to establish any truth from the polemic. Overall these were two excellent speakers at least from an ‘entertainment’ point of view. It’s only a shame that Charles Leadbetter had to get a train halfway through the session so we weren’t treated to a full debate between the two.