{"id":904,"date":"2007-10-04T11:18:23","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T17:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=904"},"modified":"2007-10-04T11:18:23","modified_gmt":"2007-10-04T17:18:23","slug":"a_beggar_upon_h_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=904","title":{"rendered":"A beggar upon horseback"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Calacanis has seen<\/a> the future of media, and it is the past. Rather than bringing an egalitarian explosion of mass creativity, the cheap and ubiquitous Web 2.0 tools of media production and distribution will be commandeered by an elite “of gifted individuals” who will use the Web 2.0 “platform” for “the creation of high-quality content and services.” Wikipedia is beginning to embrace this trend, argues Calacanis, “by locking pages down as they reach completion, and (at least in their German version) requiring edits to flow through trusted experts.”<\/p>\n

The new wave of web media – Calacanis calls it, for some reason, “Web 3.0” – “throttles the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ from turning into the ‘madness of the mobs’ we’ve seen all to[o] often, by balancing it with a respect of experts. [It] leaves behind the cowardly anonymous contributors and the selfish blackhat SEOs that have polluted and diminished so many communities. [It] is a return to what was great about media and technology before Web 2.0: recognizing talent and expertise, the ownership of ones words, and fairness.”<\/p>\n

It’s hard not to recall Yeats’s lines<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!<\/p>\n

A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Both beggars, though, labor under romantic misconceptions. For one, the web is freeing us from the shackles of the past, when our malignant media overlords stifled our creativity and force-fed us gruel. For the other, the web is returning us to a purified past, when our benign media overlords nurtured the most talented and delivered their fine works to us all. Both visions simplify the past and distort the future. The so-called new media is just old media with a different cost structure; the overlords will not be overthrown but neither will they be redeemed, and the same goes for the prosuming crowd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Calacanis has seen the future of media, and it is the past. Rather than bringing an egalitarian explosion of mass creativity, the cheap and ubiquitous Web 2.0 tools of media production and distribution will be commandeered by an elite “of gifted individuals” who will use the Web 2.0 “platform” for “the creation of high-quality […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}