I found my way to this link from one of the articles in my user-experience daily on paper.li. The essayist takes the stance that while we do have an opportunity to do more than we used to and to broaden our horizons, most people will instead exhibit traditional behavior patterns regardless of the network or change of delivery channel. This is contrary to the hype created by media experts (especially social media experts) wherein the internet is purported to transform everything from democracy to the economy.
We knew the revolution wouldn’t be televised, but many of us really hoped it might be on the Internet. Now we know these hopes were false. There was no Internet Revolution and there will be no Internet Revolution. We will stumble on in more or less exactly the way we did before massive computer networks infiltrated our daily lives. Just look around and you will see that the Singularity is not near. For some reason we don’t want to admit this fact. Media experts still talk as if the Internet is new, as if it is still evolving, as if it will shortly “change everything.” They tell us that the Web will let us build super networks (The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom), organize ourselves in magical ways (Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing without Organization), and even learn new things (Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge). These new powers will in turn enable us to transform our economy (Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything), revolutionize politics (The Revolution will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything) or perhaps even destroy our culture (The Cult of the Amateur. How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture).
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