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The Pragmatic (Internet) Optimist’s Creed

Started by TLF · 8 months ago

A few months ago, I penned a mega book review about the growing divide between “Internet optimists and pessimists.” I noted that the Internet optimists — people like Chris Anderson, Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Kevin Kelly, and others — belie ... Continue reading »

2 comments

  • Richard Bennett

    8 months ago

    I've read a lot of these social-implications-of-the-Internet books, so I see your point that they tend to fall into boosterism or pessimism camps. They also tend to rely on anecdotes rather than actual evidence to bolster their arguments, which suggests a problem to me: before we can assess the Internet's impact on society as good or bad, don't we need to understand the nature of the impact empirically? How exactly has the Internet affected journalism and publishing, for example? Are we witnessing the end of the newspaper era, or a consolidation where we're going to have three to five global news outlets who serve the entire market? In publishing, it's easy to see that the Internet as a medium for both the sale and piracy of books has put a lot of small bookshops out of business, while making a larger number of titles available. What impact has this shift toward mega-retailers like Amazon had on authors who serve small audiences?

    Internet criticism takes the answers to such questions as given, but I suspect there is some empirical data to gather that might upset some the assumptions that everyone accepts without question.

    So: fewer creeds, more data.
    reply
  • Seth Finkelstein

    7 months ago

    1) I call my view "technology-positive social criticism", but there's not a lot of support for it.

    2) Richard - there does exist some empirical work. Again, not a lot of support for it, or forpublicizing it.
    reply

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