I came across this article recently: DIGITAL MAOISM:
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. Sure, the article is 2 years old, but I think it makes some valid points.
How likely are we to find an article of such in-depth analysis as the one the author himself is presenting on Wikipedia? Highly unlikely, if not impossible. It does seem the web has been dumbed down a bit. Part of this is the “wikiation” of internet information. But a much larger degree is due to the increasing influence of people trying to turn the web into a commercial marketplace. There are literally millions of webpages that were purely designed to capture a few cents in advertising clicks or a few dollars in affiliate revenues. Most of these pages are thoughtless and make Wikipedia seem monumental in comparison. The relative “greatness” of Wikipedia and its position as information leader is only due to the poor quality of information surrounding it.
I recommend reading the article, if you haven’t read it already during the past two years. However, I am not sure that Wikipedia represents a threat as great as the author portends. Personally, I use Wikipedia when I want to find or verify some quick information, but it doesn’t stop me from delving more in depth into a topic and spending time researching it.
What has made it more difficult to research a topic is the rise in “pseudosites”. These pseudosites pretend to be websites with valuable information, but are really just sales letters or funnels toward the almighty ad click. These sites are Digital Ultracapitalist Information systems rather than Digital Maoist systems. Perhaps the real danger toward the ability to find reliable and quality information is the web’s tendency toward ultracapitalism. Far between and few are the quality founts of information that existed five or ten years ago, most of them washed out in the sea of pseudosites.
Pseudosites and Digital Ultracapitalism may be a much larger threat than Digital Maoism.
