JURGEN HABERMAS ON WEB 2.0

The Web 2.0 debate is seeping out of Silicon Valley into the real world. On March 9, Jürgen Habermas, perhaps Europe’s most influential social thinker, was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the advancement of human rights. In his acceptance speech, he spoke about the Web 2.0 threat to intellectual life in the West:

"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus."

Habermas is right. The Internet does indeed have a subversive impact on political life in authoritarian regimes. Thus the significance and value of blogs and bloggers in Iraq, Iran, China, North Korea and any other regime where the state, for ideological reasons, still attempts to monopolize media. This is the Orwell model of rebellion to Big Brother. It’s the old 20th century dystopia. Nightmare 1.0, to use the binary language of Silicon Valley.

But in the West, where there is no Orwellian state seeking to monopolize information or ideology, Habermas is correct to say that the growth of citizen media actually undermines intellectual life. To repeat Habermas’ warning:

The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.

In a word: anarchy. As Habermas says, the Web 2.0 revolution does away with the traditional filter of editors. So all we have left is an electronic media that spews out unedited opinion. The naive online reader no longer has a professional guide to help them distinguish between the writing of Jurgen Habermas and the ranting of some poor uneducated soul from the depths of the blogosphere. This is our 21st dystopia: nightmare 2.0 -- the increasingly real threat of a flattened, radically democratized media.

The Web 2.0 camp, from Silicon Valley’s techno-utopians to the leveller libertarians of the blogosphere, have no respect or value for intellectuals, whether they be on the political left or the right. In their minds, the very idea of an “intellectual” smacks of elitism and injustice. So the great achievement of the Web 2.0 is the undermining of the idea of a specialist, an expert, an intellectual. For more on the destructive consequences of this idealism, see my Weekly Standard review of Glenn Reynolds’ An Army of Davids.

Stay tuned for more on Jurgen Habermas’ arguments about Web 2.0. Next step is to invite him onto the afterTV show to discuss his views in more detail.

Comments

[Charles T]

Interesting to bring Habermas into this debate. I've been following your blog with interest and find a number of your arguments convincing, especially your defence of intellectual elitism. I assume you've read Christopher Lasch on this. I get the sense that you are leading a new movement of historical leftists who are now shifting to a defence of traditional elites and government. You sound a bit like Adorno without all the Frankfurt School mustard

[John Bruce]

Regarding Habermas, I’m not sure if this egalitarianism is completely bad, and I’m not sure if it’s automatic. Some of my instincts, honed in the blogosphere, lead me to mistrust Europeans who win prestigious European awards, and Habermas’s remarks seem colored by what is likely an instinctive European elitism. You don’t have to buy into every jot and tittle of Jacksonian democracy to see merit to some good ol' in-your-face egalitarianism now and then.

More at http://mthollywood.blogspot.com

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

"About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say.

'Anything to say about what?' inquired Gatsby politely.

'Why—any statement to give out.'

It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out 'to see.' "
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter6.html

[Brendan]

I would love to hear what Habermas has to say on After TV - Interesting piece that Al Saracevic posted on the SF Gate blog:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=19&entry_id=4058

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

"Absent Minds? The question of intellectuals in Britain" by
Stefan Collini, philosopher and Professor of English, University of Cambridge
http://www.thersa.org/events/detail.asp?eventID=1846

[Lisa]

Why should we prefer a political biased newspaper to a blog? Your so called "professional guides" have been filtered and edited too much and are no longer a good source for any reader (naive or not).
And who are those people that try to make us believe that one must receive something like the "Bruno Kreisky Prize" in order to be heard?
One would think those intellectuals would know better.

[Carl Schmit]

Andrew - I absolutely agree with you!

[Alan Green]

I don't really care what Habermas says. What, exactly, is he an expert on? And isn't his difficult to understand sociology just proof of the irrelevance of expertise?

Anyone who relies on a german academic to make an argument clearly has spent too much time with Marx and Hegel

[Orwell]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1752729,00.html

you should look at this piece on Orwell. I think he would agree with Habermas about the crisis of intellectual authority.

You are definitely covering new ground here. You have some of the most original ideas in the blogosphere -- and yet you are against the bloggers. I don't get it. Are you writing a book on this?

[Brondu]

Web 2.0 isn't anarchy it's heterarchy (under which there is always the provisional possibility for emergent greatness), and to say that you completely agree with Andrew, Carl, is basically to surrender your voice until such time as you become a recognized scholar and earn your right to agree or disagree.

I mean look at us all. We're a clustration, a sampling as it were, of the sort of uninformed masses who have been given the right to chime in on various affairs. Do we seem as ill-deservant of the kind of power Web 2.0 grants us as Habermas maskes us out to be?

And as far as the vertically potent powers such as Habermas himself: has his voice in any way been obscured by the democratization and horizontal distribution of webspace? It seems, rather, that in this inevitable (yes, inevitable) nascent structure that is Web 2.0 the opinions of those most worthy of having them will be accentuated by the localized crowds gathered to pay tribute with their presence alone.

Sure, everyone can have a place to disseminate their own partially articulated and poorly arrived at conclusions, but a co-emergant heirarchy will arise amid all of those seemingly flatlandic boistrousness, as it is already emerging. A hierarchy that will neither negate nor promote the rantings of the poorly informed... but will rather impersonally adjucitate the veracity of the tenets of those who think highly of themselves.

It will work something like this: "I'm Habermas, and I think I'm sweet so I'll get a blog just like everyone else and I'll write and if I get a hundred comments a day it means I'm as awesome as I think I am, but if I try and generate interest and no one gives a shit either because my presentation skills blow or because the actual referents I'm attempting at dilineating suck cosmic balls then I guess it's Web 2.0's fault for shining the spotlight too broadly and leaving me the hell out of it."

But really, in Web 2.0, the spotlight shines where there is a concentration of individuals, all freely expressing themselves. And concentrations of individuals only happen near the vertical super-intelligences likes Habermas. So there is no threat to intellectualism because if you're smart enough you'll get attention, but if you're not smart enough to make your smartness interesting and accessible, you won't get any and that's no one's fault but your own. Dig?

(but don't listen to me because this is the first time I've ever heard of Web 2.0 or Habermas)

[larry B]

hey Brondu -- you need to spend some time in a library. If you've never heard of Habermas, you really are lacking a core education. It's nothing to be proud of. Get reading, son, or get gone.

[Brondu]

hehehe

a core education....

nothing to be proud of...

lol...

my views on this were a bit partial, I admit. I was influenced by a buddy to be antagonistic and detractive. If I had been told to corroborate Habermas I may have come up with a more inclusive approach and the subsequent limning and content of my viewpoint would have taken on agreeable qualities; unfortunately I blearily threw the weight of my uninformed, uneducated and consequently deeply shallow intellect into some sort of a deconstrutive effort. It seems I should be more careful with what I do with my time and mind.

As far as a core education goes, though... you've really narrowed the definition of the term.

I've read 10,000 words from various authors (experts in their respective fields) in the last three months, increasingly adroitly subsuming books spanning a wide range of topics and correlating developmental lines. the reading stretched capacties in numerous domains (not the least of which would be cognitive, and with an increased cognitive scope came the ability to apprehend complex social systems and networks within networks of holarchical enfoldment).

I had to quit school to give myself this education.

the education your tone hints at seems much less inclusive then the one I gave myself.

as far as getting gone, goes... what evs. I'm out of here.

[Gary E. Davis]

Andrew, that's a very interesting discussion; and the comments, too! I'm going to link to this at the Habermas discussion group, in complement to my earlier indication of Habermas' speech:

"blogosphere got you down, Jürgen?"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/habermas/message/1428

Last week, Habermas presented a lecture on political communication:

"JH speech on 'Political communication in media society'"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/habermas/message/1539

... which included an interesting footnote on Internet life that I briefly discussed:

"Political communication in media society and Internet life"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/habermas/message/1540

I want to soon make time to comment more specifically on your posting and others' comments; and hope, in any event, that you'll return to the topic. I'll stay in touch.

[Sven Hedin]

reply : "In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus"(Jürgen Habermas). Have You
seen Habermas' kids standing in the shadow? Distributed decentralisation causes power-loss and the decline of intellectuals on the Net is thereof
a side-effect.

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[Rob Lewis]

I am slightly surprised at the Habermas position- crudely distinguishing between the system world and the lifeworld, it seems to me that the power to the Web (2.0 is a manifestation or congregation of effects) in its social form belongs to a messy lifeworld where there is less structure, and what structure there is is less concerned with reinforcing power paradigms as it is in exploring, accommodating and creating new paradigms which themselves may be temporary - I suspect there is something of wounded ego behind all this as in the web world we all feel we can discuss and interpret/misinterpret Habermas (as an example) as opposed to joining the pedagogoc tradition of great masters of thought. the web is far too dialectical for that surely?

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