Belief in power is a way of deferring responsibility for your own life. You give your chosen authority figure total control and allow him to choose for you what’s right and what’s wrong. You must never allow anyone else to choose for you what’s right and what’s wrong or you’re lost forever.
- Brad Warner
I read this quote shortly after reading something Clay Shirky wrote recently and couldn’t help but see some connections. I started to wonder if we have put our faith in the Great Web 2.0? I do feel like there is a sort of religious zeal for the power of the Web and that it has been amplified by talk of the Great 2.0. As if we can all agree that the Internet is clearly going to fix a lot of our problems and Web 2.0 will save the world. A lot of Web 2.0 writing comes across with an almost religious belief in a power figure. It reminds of the kinds of things that people say about their faith in their gurus.
Clay Shirky recently addressed the web 2.0 conference crowd with a well written piece about why the web is different, why it is significant. His argument is that we have been channeling a collective cognitive surplus into watching TV for the last few decades and now we are starting to emerge from our stupor and participate in things again. He has some remarkable statistics about this shift and makes a compelling argument. But something unsettles me about his argument. And his closing story–about a little girl watching a movie and walking behind the TV to try and find the mouse (look at the last two paragraphs of the post linked to above)–explained it…
Are we just trading the kind of mind-numbing stagnation of TV watching for a sort of mind-numbing activeness? What is wrong with being able to sit through a movie? and more importantly, what is wrong with doing nothing (and no, watching tv doesn’t count as doing nothing)? I don’t agree that doing something is always better than doing nothing and I think that is a dangerous mindset. Being very busy can look very productive. And the Internet has given us many, many ways to look (and be) really busy. But are we just being seduced into thinking that we are getting something done — and that there is something out there that needs getting done right now? I am certainly not defending TV watching, but I can’t defend the notion that taking part in Web 2.0 related activities like editing Wikipedia is somehow inherently better (I’m not saying its worse, either, but not inherently better). Sometimes, what we really need to do is sit down and shut up… not watch television, not update your linked-in account or your favourite wikipedia entry, not check your rss feeds… just do nothing.
(I say this as someone who spends far too much time in front of a computer and is (ironically) trying very hard to learn to do nothing.)