Just enjoyed a fascinating session featuring David Weinberger and Andrew Keen offering two different takes on the direction the web has taken us. Please excuse my incomplete notes; I apologize for any errors; my personal (silent) comments are in italics.

David: Way too much information, they warned in the 90’s. way more than predicted. Why aren’t we drowing? More information to help us keep from drowning.

How are we going to find what matters to us? Fragmentation has always been the main challenge of the web. Solution is looking at the metadata.

Two orders of order – you organize the data. Everything goes in one place – archives of photos. Then you get metadata and sort that – the library card catalogue.

Being the person who decides what goes on top – ie newspaper editors - gives you power.

Books are knowledge, but they’re physical, so constrained. We like trees, we organize stuff, like the animal kingdom, and then we have experts in this.

Now we’re in the 3rd order of order – digitizing everything. We’re taking the leaves off the trees, making a huge miscellanous pile. Rather than experts decide, the users decide how to order and organize and sort.

So traditionally everything has to go on one branch, but online you can file in as many different categories as you want. Now if you remember a bit of the content, you can get the author and title. If everything is metadata, we just got way smarter than we were 10 years ago. And you can do this better online than offline. The most exciting stuff on the web is how we have helped each other – reviews, tagging, clustered and lumpy – find stuff.

In broadcasting we’ve been used to dumbing things down to reach the largest audience. We take complex information and simplify it.

Frequently wikipedia is better than what we get from any one individual. Same with mailing lists. One person speaks, and another person comments. The list is smarter than any one expert on it. Knowledge has become social. Online, our kids are doing their homework socially but they’re being tested as individuals. So the system is broken.

And now we are seeing a cataclysmic change, where knowledge is encircled by understanding. It’s not being degraded by “more bad knowledge out there”. Yes it’s harder, but we’re getting smarter because we can understand what we know.

We’re building the real semantic web as an infrastructure for meaning. This is the real advance, we are just beginning on it and it will go on for years – and it’s ours, not belonging to any experts.

Andrew Keen –

Is it good or bad that authority is changing on the web? I’ve been defined by others as a conservative, but I’m not. I miss modernity, connected with radically new “access to culture”. Mass media, mass literacy.

Recorded music, movies, books, physical products have allowed mass access to education, that historically people haven’t had – in contrast to the late middle ages.

So where are we going? I’m fearful that the digital utopians – and these people actually believe what they say, they’re not being dishonest – I’m concerned it will return us to the middle ages. (IWH: Wow – I am blown away by the condescension of this.) What we’re losing in the withering away of mass culture is increasing hierarchy, the division between rich and poor. The scarcities are pretty constant. Talent is the key scarcity. There will be more scarcity of information and education in the new digital world. Not for us, the cognoscenti. But when you undermine the formal structures of authority, you’re doing away with access for education for the masses. We can come up with cute names for the masses but they’re still the masses.

What do we gain with hierarchy, what do we lose? The digital revolution is creating profound new hierarchies. Dramatic contrasts of wealth, like a return to the middle ages. Not a flat utopia, not the long tail, not what David Weinberger believes in.

Boundries became geographical and physical. We’re seeing this reappear, the lifestyle we lead that is artistocratic, these people who make lots of money and talk of the revolution. Like the elites of the middle ages. They lost touch with their physical community.

In spite of the optimism, the eulogies about democracy and accessibilty, the realities are _less_ conversation, communities rooted in hierarchy. This is generally bad. It’s not creating democracy.

David Weinberger responds: We all agree the digital divide is bad, and you argued against it. If we got rid of it though, you’d be upset, because more people would be in this new web world you don’t like.

Andrew: How do you think people acquire cultural authority — or is it given?

DW: This is one of the hallmarks of differences in culture, is that this happens differently everywhere. We’ve had a situation based on the scarcity of paper or channels, that have driven us to require experts.

AK: What I don’t understand is how authority will be derived from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

IWH: This is the inherent problem with Andrew’s perspective here for me, is that he seems to assume that everyone who is talking on the web who isn’t an established, edited journalist “doesn’t know what they’re talking about”. There needs to be the understanding that someone who works with digital security is likely to be a better expert in it than some journalist who tries to learn about it in time to write an article about it for Wired. I get Andrew’s point – that getting rid of newspapers could lead to unfettered morons writing the news. But in fact that’s not what’s happening, as we have seen. What’s happening is that smart people with diverse perspectives are establishing authority in their space precisely because they are smarter and more trustworthy – and most importantly, more relevant — than the mainstream media. There are so many more relevant topics to each of us as individuals, than mainstream, temporarily available mass media can deliver. Mainstream media hasn’t been eroded accidentally- it’s been eroded on purpose because market forces have made it less relevant.

DW: Many experts are talented and knowledgable – in much of mass culture, tastes are driven by the lowest common denominator. So we are inventing ways of addressing this very challenge that you bring up. Some of them are dead ends, but some are astounding successes. I’d count wikipedia as one, but if you disagree we can find another example. I don’t believe that you think you can’t find anything important or interesting on the web.

Kevin: How does the web bring more hierarchy Andrew? Can you explain?

AK: The web has been announced in the name of the people – the wisdom of the crowd and these other catchphrases. But this is an anonymous oligarchy. Is the crowd really doing what everybody says it is? Or is it a small group of activists who are driving this?

IWH: I see this as another way of saying, “Is the Internet just a fad?” This is a 1990’s perspective. Yes, people are using it. Just ask the Pew Internet and American Life project. But we Americans have a cultural difference with the British, and we likely use the Internet differently as well. So much of this disagreement may be cultural.

DW: There is a democratization, your book acknowledges that. The growth of YouTube crap instead of controlled editorial.

AK: It’s stuff out there. I don’t think people are really reading it. I don’t believe it has authority. The people need experts that inform and educate, and this media isn’t doing that.

DW. This is additive. The web means more of everything. You’ve got great experts getting exposure on the web. Mortimer Adler, you can get more of him online. The leading authorities are there. The web is more of everything – racism and Clay Shirky, porn. Cicero in Latin translated into French.

AK: What you’re describing is disorder, for us we can navigate it. But for the majority of the people it’s chaos. They need experts, they need teachers. This media doesn’t have signposts.

IWH: this sounds pretty condescending to me.

DW: We need to take this perspective seriously. We do know our way around, and kids need to be taught to be curious, it smells like a business opportunity. Let’s come up with ways that we can redirect the youth to the good stuff.

AK: What was wrong with the traditional media system?

DW: I can’t find the work that was written by someone I’ve never heard of, or the old books that are now out of print, the books the library can’t keep up with. The YouTube video that breaks your heart. We’re way richer than we were.

AK: I would strongly disagree. We are way poorer now. My book idealizes mainstream media, it’s not that glittering, but historically it’s done a good job creating mass culture. The problem with web 2.0 is it doesn’t do any of these things. It doesn’t sell, it doesn’t market, it doesn’t keep up with the expertise to build and develop and sell and market mass culture to the people. What we collectively have done is destroy that, in the name of the people. In the name of disintermediating. We’re left with the anarchy of the web. And now David is telling me, we need to figure out how to find the few decent blogs out of the 20 million. Having trashed an authoritative media economy, which is now in deep crisis, now we need to find a way out of it. Now we suddenly realize we’ve destroyed the thing of real value. Now we have to find the editors, the experts, to help us out of this.

DW: I’m saying that we are already doing these replacement things. It’s already happening.

AK: Collectively I think we’ve done a dreadful job.

Mitch Ratcliffe: You’re both skeptics. I could point to things in the real world that David is skeptical about. Nostalgia for any past is as dangerous as hope for a future which may actually be full of undesirable changes. As skeptics, what are the standards or principles that you two can agree on, that we can use to measure against as we leap into the future, whatever it may be?

DW: One measure is the value of the cultural objects we maintain. While Andrew maintains a canon, I think what’s important is more diverse than just that.

AK: I disagree that everything is miscellaneous. And that’s the whole problem with wikipedia, that some random thing is just as important as Joan of Arc. If you do away with the hierarchy of knowledge, and say all facts are equal, you’ve lost that.

MR: I asked what you could agree on, not what you could disagree on. And I heard what you can’t agree on.

DW: We don’t agree.

AK: Your question is interesting, this is an ironic thing about these debates, is that we share cultural and political values. I respect David and Kevin and these idealists. We share the same ideals.

Tom Mandel: This is the same argument that was made against writing itself, and against moveable type. “Now anybody can write a book!”. My point is that the authority of the Queen of England comes from tradition. The authority of the Rolling Stones comes from charisma. There’s no real means of determining authority and expertise. (Tom gets some applause)

Sam from Wikipedia: I agree with andrew’s concerns, but I think David is right. And I don’t think you’re very far apart. You want to always have the concerns of what you’re losing if you do something new. What’s important on wikipedia is what gets said, not who said it. It’s not about the people’s credentials, it’s about what whether they say is correct or verifiable or cited. It’s the strength of argument. And that’s what we want experts to be. We want them to be well-researched. It’s what they say that’s important.

Audience: I have a degree in library science, and a doctorate. It fits into what David has described. Let’s look at the people who don’t have voices. Kevin worked hard at finding new voices. But our history is one of white men without proven authority getting to be in charge. Do you have a doctorate? Are you a librarian? And yet, you should still be allowed to have your say up there. We’ll always have different lenses, and you’re saying other people’s lenses are bad because they don’t fit your world view. (Applause)

Brad Templeton. I want to address your phrase the scarcity of talent. In Canada our hockey team can whup British and US butts. Talent appears when there is a demand for talent. The supply appears when it’s something that’s done around the neighborhood. I don’t have the fear of a scarcity of talent. Today YouTube may be full of garbage, but it will get better.

AK: I would strongly disagree with the lady. [the Librarian]. The idea that mainstream media was run by cultural elites I don’t accept. Our current media system isn’t rooted in specific class or gender interests.

Librarian: That’s like saying you disagree that the sun rises in the east. It’s a fact.

AK: The media system is meritocratic. You’re not born into this, most people are free to pursue it if they choose. People aren’t stopped from being moviemakers because of the color of their skin or their gender.

IWH: I see a cultural divide here. To a British person, the US system is very meritocratic. To a black woman from the south trying to write for the New Yorker, maybe not so much!

AK: There needs to be a debate. My book is getting attention, because there are real issues here. We can’t agree on some muddled middle.

MR: It’s a misunderstanding to say I wanted a muddled middle ground! We can start with generalities and work out from those towards specifics.

DW: I’d be happy to discuss it with you Mitch but maybe not best discusses on a panel format. Andrew, the Canadian guy and the Wikipedia guy are saying that talent and authority can come from alternative sources.

AK: I’d argue that it’s traditional media’s job to find raw talent and polish it up.

IWH: To me, Andrew’s view sounds snobbish — it’s based on the idea that some people should be able to have a voice and others should not, or that some media is inherently good and other content is inherently not, or that Financial Times journalists are better at explaining economic theory than a grad student at Harvard. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. “Mainstream” does not define any one of our tastes. David’s is a more nuanced point of view. Not everyone is served by whatever shows up in a few magazines, TV shows and newspapers.

I might want to see coverage on, for example, John Kerry’s traitorous Swift Boat career. And thanks to the web, that is available to me now, whereas the Times might not have thought it truthful enough to cover. Or I might want a Vogue sewing pattern for a 1960’s evening dress, and the traditional source is only offering the 2007 line. I might be a teenage girl more interested in Frank Sinatra than Britney Spears, but Seventeen doesn’t cater to my tastes. I might be a vegetarian, or a Mormon, or a Jew, or a diabetic, in a town that thinks I’m a freak because I’m different, and I want to connect with voices like mine although they’re not featured in the town newspaper I subscribe to.