4. Ignorance is Bliss

Hope everyone had a great weekend (I'm still depressed about Kobe's game winner vs the Celtics today but ill save that for another time).

This week the Boss will discuss articles by Duncan Riley and Andrew Keen where each author takes an opposing view of the internet and web 2.0.

I want to start off by saying I completely agree with Duncan Riley. I believe he is a little harsh towards Doris Lessing, but feel as though he wanted to make his position clear. I believe that Doris Lessing is just one of those old people that is stuck in their ways and is ignorant to the power of the internet. She probably thinks the internet is only social media and meaningless blogs (which to an extent it is) but what Doris is forgetting about or ignorant to are the numerous benefits that the internet gives us. The internet provides users with infinite amount of knowledge at their disposal along with the ability to share ideas and compare views. There are so many people in the world who know about certain things that they would have never known about if not for the internet.

In regards to Andrew Keen, I see him as an author who is taking a bold stand against a popular tool (the internet/web 2.0) in order to make himself relevant and maybe even make a couple bucks with his new book. For example, he starts his article off with a bragpost about how he was on The Colbert Report and implies that Colbert is a web 2.0 elitist as well while giving no evidence that this is so. He seems to really relish in his elitist views.

Keen argues that the internet provides less accurate and reliable portrait of the news than professionally edited newspapers, encyclopedias, or books which is something I completely disagree on. Most news stories on the internet have been cross referenced so many times by numerous sources that they are just as legitimate as information in print.

Keen appears to want to transform the internet into a closed gated community where people won't be google-ing for answers but they will search on Mahalo.com and DoneRight.com (professional search engines). He tries to forecast that expertise on the internet is going to be the next big thing which I applaud him for but he should really check out my blog post last week about crowdsourcing (I know, bragpost) and how the wave is only getting bigger.

***We must also keep in mind that Lessing and Keen are both authors so it makes sense that they would have negative views of the internet because the internet allows people access to so much stuff that odds are less people are going read their books, which probably annoys them to some degree.

In the end, I believe we should embrace the evolution and the power of the internet because it can be used as a great tool giving users limitless opportunities to make a positive impact on the world.

The Boss is done for now, time to cry myself to sleep over that Celtic's loss. We da best.