In "The New Seekers," The Spectator's David Jennings counters Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen's bleak vision of anarchy resulting from a "dictatorship of idiots." Jennings believes that Web 2.0 technologies are enriching our culture rather than reducing it to a state of chaos, where everyone fancies themselves experts:
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.
At the center of this is the shift from passive consumer to active critic, driven by discovery:
Discovery itself is an anarchic and unruly activity: it loves to slip through cracks, disappearing down rabbit holes and making associative leaps between material that may not at first appear to be connected. We all know the pleasure of arriving at the work of a new favourite author, composer or film-maker via what seems an incredibly circuitous path or a chance mention from a friend. It is our natural inquisitiveness that leads us to root out these new discoveries, foraging in the areas that appear most fertile in terms of our tastes.
Web 2.0 technologies, regardless of how short-lived some of them may be, allow us to find connections that we hadn't seen before and learn more about our own taste and the tastes of those in our networks. These "taste trails" pave the way for further discovery and encourage us to become active seekers.
One of my favorite examples of these is Last.FM. After creating an account, you download a plugin for your media player which "scrobbles"—sends track metadata—to Last.FM. Over time, Last.FM compiles the data to create public charts of your most listened artists and songs. The site recommends "Neighbours," users with similar music taste, and artists that, through the data collected from all users, align with what you like. Last.FM also has a radio feature that allows you to listen to stations based on your data. There are also journal features and all artist information pages are editable by Last.FM members like a wiki.
Last.FM connects artists to artists, artists to people, and more, making it a fantastic discovery engine and personal music dashboard. I've been using it for a while now so I have a lot of information which might make my profile a fun one to poke around if you're not familiar with the system: http://www.last.fm/user/agreatnotion. One of my favorite features is the Events tab, which allows me to list what shows I have attended/will attend.
Avatar which always shows music you listened recently
Posted by: DB | October 17, 2007 at 12:47 AM