Given all that it has done for me and my family (and you too, I'd suspect, since you're reading this), I'm a big fan of the Internet. I dug 1.0, am still enamored with 2.0, am looking forward to 3.0 and hope to be around when 4.0 pops up. Perhaps my yet-unborn grandchildren will make a killing--figuratively, not literally, I hope--with 5.0.
That said, I find I learn a lot by reading contrarian viewpoints, so I can't wait to dig into Andrew Keen's new book, The Cult of the Amateur--How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture (capitals mine).
My namesake hooked me big time, on page 1 for crissakes, when he tells the story of meeting a much overdriven acquaintance who described his current project as "MySpace meets YouTube meets Wikipedia meets Google...on steroids."
Ween's classic reply, which one day may be an epitaph of this century's first decade, was to counter-describe HIS current project, the polemic about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy and values, as:
"Ignorance meets egoism
meets bad taste
meets mob rule.
On steroids."
So strong was this Pow! that the book nearly fell from my hands. Looking forward to this Labor Day Weekend, when I have a few hours to spare to take the rest in.
(By the way, with all the above "meeting" going on, could Keen be giving rise to Anti-Social Networking?)