The hype surrounding Web 2.0’s ability to democratise content production obscures its centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist’s paradise where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users,  ride on the technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production

http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/artsdebate/

The Arts Council has got a blog on... As part of the 'first ever public value enquiry' into the arts, ACE is creating an elaborate set of feedback mechanisms, one of which is a website discussion currently well underway at Artscouncil.org.uk. Nothing is yet visible of the focus groups, meetings and one-to-one interviews that are also promised in this £500,000 enquiry, but the website augurs interesting times ahead. To respond to an apparently widely felt dissatisfaction with ACE's existing 'tick box' style indices (deemed, one imagines, to be crude and demeaning of art's higher functions), this process has ostensibly been initiated to shape what Chief Exec Peter Hewitt describes as 'a more contemporary notion of accountability in the publicly funded arts sector, one that is meaningful to the Arts Council’s own ambitions, to the individuals and organisations we fund and to wider society.'

Can social media increase and improve civic participation? If so, in what ways? There's a lot being said and written about the subject these days, but it is difficult to get a clear overview of the opinions.

I attempt here to collect viewpoints both for and against the premise that social media is creating a better public sphere, and analyze them in the context of what constitutes a public and its antithesis, a mass. In presenting what are sometimes extreme positions within this debate (too idealistic v. too critical), my hope is to begin to understand the reality that lies in the middle, and come closer to understanding social media's potential (and limitations) as a tool to bring about social change.

(originally published here under a Creative Commons license)  

At a general level, we could say that on one side of the debate are those who believe that social media can increase civic participation and shift the balance of power away from the institutions that currently stand in the way of change. On the other side are those who warn that social media can only offer a reduced form of participation, that it diminishes the value of individual contributions, and that it leaves social systems more prone to manipulation by lowering their intelligence to the minimum common denominator (i.e., stupidity or mediocrity).

Thus, the debate can be framed in terms of whether social media can engender democratic publics that embody an intelligence and capacity for action greater than the sum of its members, or whether it will merely continue to support the production of anti-democratic masses of disenfranchised and alienated consumers. Of course, social media is a big label encompassing many different technologies, and even the same technologies can be applied differently in various contexts. But while features and applications might differ, the people contributing to this debate are obviously focused on the aggregated impact that social media is having on our societies rather than on specific examples of applications.