In his article “World Wide Mush,” Jarone Lanier makes the argument that the internet and Web 2.0 collectivized thinking drown out any truly creative ideas. People also make the argument that they only serve to further creativity. My argument is that they do exactly neither.
Lanier laments that Web 2.0 will reduce the middle class to only accepting only “kudos” for their truly great ideas. Where his logic falls apart, though, is that the great successes of group-think have very little to do with people giving away knowledge that they could other wise profit from. Wikipedia may put some encyclopedias out of business, but the information is rarely of any use to the individual contributors. If someone thinks an idea is profitable, they rarely submit it for peer evaluation. Take the iPad for example, like all of their new products, Apple chose to wait to unveil it until they had finished manufacturing it. Perhaps if they had created a blog for customers to submit their ideas and opinions, they may have created a better product (or at least had a better name), but they knew that if they did they would risk a competitor stealing their idea and potential profit.
It is this restriction of Web 2.0 to less-than-profitable subjects that also keeps it from furthering creativity to any great extent. Because people don’t share their best ideas, those who might have been able to improve upon it can’t.
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