You Know What Really Grinds My Gears?

Labels.

Labels grinds my gears. Elitist, populist, amateur, professional. Who really defines these labels. People with credentials such as degrees, positions, and badges? or mass consensus? Even if we picked a group to align with, a view to look through, there's always an opposing side even within that group.

Why must we lock ourselves into any one position? Why can't I stand in the middle? Oh but if I did that I'm wishy washy. #@&! that.

I just read an article from the American Society of Association Executives and I just about puked. Andrew Keen made me puked a little bit in my mouth. That didn't stop me from reading his other piece at Weekly Standard that says Web2.0 is essentially communism in effect.

Have you ever read or heard something that's just so ridiculous you experience disbelief and immediate nausea? well those 2 articles did that for me. Granted it's a pretty frequent occurence for me of late, all caused by Mr. Keen's elite traditional media no less (The O'Really He Did Not Just Say That Factor, and the recent CNN presidential debates).

Keen is a hypocrite, but I'll get back to this later. Since I'm only a college student, I'm not worthy enough to criticize Mr. Keen. So I'll borrow BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis's view, which I agree with to start. "In web 2.0, Keen sees the means of flattening culture. I see the means of the people speaking. That’s not communism. That’s democracy. That’s freedom."

What Keen calls amateur "junk" are the people's voices. How is that killing culture? how is that "flattening" it. I would think that everyone obeying some elitist's point of view will flatten culture not the other way around.

Keen says that because of Web 2.0, the only courageous thing for people to do is not to write, not to have an opinion. "Since everyone will use digital media to express themselves, the only decisive act will be to not mark the paper." Those are his actual words. It's complete bullshit and this is where he's a hypocrite. He himself have a blog and a podcast. At the end of the day, he's just another Web 2.0 nobody, if you look at it from his point of view. The only thing I can agree with Keen is that Web2.0 is a neutral tool.

I can spiel on and on about this, but I'll leave you with this clip from Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon's last line toward the Harvard graduate student is great.



P.S.: I just added the AnswerTips application, double click anyword to get definition. It even works with movies, so try double clicking anything on this page.