[iDC] THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Andrew Keen)

[Anna Munster]

>
> This would suggest that Adorno didn't quite get it. He may have been right
> speaking of Germany in the 1930's but the London of the late 20th Century,
> and many other such places, would seem to suggest a different model of how
> taste is created and picked up.

Yep, right on Simon!

And can I just say that it is rather pathetic that we have to keep having
these stupid debates about: taste vs trash; high vs low; elites vs. mass;
old vs. new media. - every time we want to provide a critique of a
contemporary phenomenon such as Web 2.0...Having lived through the rise of
Birmingham School critique in the 1980s - which incidentally could be
brought to be sometimes rather usefully in some contemporary instances - I
find it incredibly wasteful to have to keep having these tired old issues
re-aired.

I am not suggesting that Adorno or any other Frankfurt schooler doesn't
have their place but I really think that the gist of Keen's position is to
revive a rather boring old debate about culture and aesthetics because he
can't find a new or present way to deal with the issues raised via
something like Web 2.0. As far as I am concerned this book does nothing
except serve its own hype and should be relegated to the 'dust' of history
(I say quite knowingly) along with other dinosaurs such as Dreyfus' "On
the Internet".

As Simon's post points out, the production of culture and for that matter
virtualities or any other such nefarious entity is way more complex...I
thought we would have at least got the idea that there is no pitting of
the old and the new, the elite and the masses anymore as these very terms
are re-made and up for grabs in the contemporary moment (which doesn't
mean that there isn't power anymore either or that Web 2.0 is a digital
utopia).

Really I find the likes of Terranova, Lovink and Carr more insightful on
the constituent relations between mass and power, web and street etc than
Keen's particular brand of moral and high culture hyperbole...

cheers Anna


Dr. Anna Munster
Senior Lecturer,
Postgraduate Co-ordinator
School of Art History and Theory
College of Fine Arts
University of New South Wales
P.O Box 259
Paddington,
NSW 2021
ph: 612 9385 0741
fx: 612 9385 0615