The new seekers

This scenario is taken from an eight-minute film distributed (via the internet, of course) in 2004 and presenting itself as reportage from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014. It conjures up one of two dystopian visions of our digital future — the one that sees our cultural choices filtered and processed by software algorithms and statistical number-crunching.

The other dystopia owes less to Orwell and more perhaps to the anti-collectivism of Ayn Rand’s Anthem. In his recent book, The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen paints a picture of what he calls a ‘dictatorship of idiots’. His bugbears are not technocrats but sites such as Wikipedia where anyone can edit the record of events and impose their interpretation, regardless of credentials or expertise. Wikipedia is one of the family of online initiatives known as ‘Web 2.0’: if Version 1 of the web saw the internet primarily as a publishing medium for corporations and advertisers, then this new incarnation is much more participative.

Keen presents a doom-laden prognosis when it comes to the emergence of media that encourage users to contribute comments and ratings, or even to originate their own material on blogs, rather than be merely passive consumers. He stokes the fear that, as tallies of user votes replace expert editorial selections, the media ecosystem that fosters and promotes talent will be undermined. The dictatorship of idiots is also a recipe for anarchy, as authoritative guides in traditional mass media are diluted and eroded by a Babel of competing voices on blogs where everyone is ‘famous for 15 people’.

But is this simply tilting at windmills? After all, we don’t need our cultural lives to be run like a government, and many of us positively welcome the unpredictability of stumbling upon new, exciting and perhaps as yet untamed artists. Anarchy is not synonymous with chaos — many of nature’s most complex and stable systems could be said to be anarchic. On the contrary, it embraces influence and leadership, if not regulation. Order emerges from disorder and diversity by evolution, and the central innovation and beauty of the Web 2.0 family of technologies is that they find ways to harness and accelerate this emergence, digitising Babel so that it can be processed, distilled and structured.