Brighton Web Awards 2007
Return to Blindness and Visual Impairment
Keynote speech
Date: 15/11/2007
Venue: Sallis Benney Theatre at Brighton University
Article
I never tire of telling the story which I am sure I have told you before of how Howard Rheingold and I had a friendly argument at the end of the 1980s about whether the internet would become a paradise for anarchists or capitalists. Of course, in an environment of almost unlimited capacity this kind of discussion is more about philosophy than forecasting and you could argue that both of us were right; but let me begin this discussion of the pretentiously entitled Web 2.0 with Carey's law of the internet: if it's any good a capitalist will steal it or buy it; if it's rubbish, the anarchists can keep it.
Now one of the serious points I want to make is that as a blind person I am pretty well out of this. There are ways round the Captcha problem but, by and large, the major Web 2.0 sites are inaccessible but there is one area which I cannot avoid and which has begun to pollute the hallow Google search report and that is blogging.
When I was a child I was deeply suspicious of Any Answers on the Home Service because it gave fascists the chance to air their views in response to the Any Questions panel. Then came the birth of local radio and a tidal wave of phone-ins; and now blogs. I mean if I want to hear two or more people talking rubbish and not listening to each other I can go to the pub near to closing time. If I want bad journalism I can switch on the BBC for a dose of regurgitated lobby press releases, bent research and unenlightening dichotomy and I therefore particularly resent the bloggy lobby which seems to use a set of mysterious rules based on word association : football,
"The world is going to end next Saturday"
"That's an extreme reaction to Brighton and Hove Albion losing at home"
"Perfidious Albion"
"Which Shakespeare play was that in, then?"
"Teaching Shakespeare is out-dated"
"Teaching is out-dated"
"What do we mean by out-dated"
"It's the end of time"
"Yes, next Saturday."
Quod Erat Demonstrandum. We have come round full circle but there was nothing worthwhile on the journey.
Some people who should know better - who should know better? - say that blogging is beginning to change the way we 'do journalism' to which my sad rejoinder is that it will simply make it even more irrational than it is now. No doubt there are glowing exceptions, brilliant blogs by people of integrity who cannot get themselves printed in edited or peer reviewed media but the opportunity for megalomania is immense.
Now to more serious matters. You will probably not remember my complaint last year that I was being deprived of access to pornography and gambling; well, I am sad to report it has got much worse. In the domains of Second Life, My Space, Flickr and Facebook I'm deprived of just about everything; and even if some dead pan do-gooder volunteers to describe YouTube videos it isn't the same as seeing for yourself. Imagine switching the radio on and being entertained with movie sound-tracks plus audio description.
But behind these remarks there lies a much more serious point. Ever since the Epiphany of Tim Berners-Lee, the disability world has been interested in helping people to access and process data. That approach is well in line with the tendency of the internet to facilitate top/down transactions from governments and multinationals respectively to citizens and consumers. So if we are going to get a bit more of the Rheingold into the system we need to help all kinds of people to learn how to create content. Calling it Web 2.0 is a typical piece of technological nonsense. Just as virtual material has taken on architectural metaphors - web sites and portals - it should have taken on precisely the opposite kind of metaphors. So the use of Web 2.0 obscures the fact that the important thing is people and what they do. There is, if you like, a certain comfort in the fact that the Web is now so big and free that stupid people can use it to do stupid things; that may cause me inconvenience but it's better than a Web that is so limited that only self important people can do self important things.
What you do is an important starting point for what needs to be done. The cultural paradigm in our society is still the late Romantic novelist, such as Proust, writing a massive prose work in his cork-lined attic. We still have far too many examinations taking place with rows of students performing autonomously in silent halls. Our cultural metaphor should be the movies of Cecil B. de Mille; there are a few really brilliant people who can write a novel or who can make a movie alone but the majority of us can only create beautiful things in coalitions; and the less well trained we are or the fewer skills we have the more important it is to be part of a sympathetic and constructive coalition.
So I want to give you this challenge. In the next year, find some people who are either frightened of the Web or who think it isn't for them, or who simply don't have any skill, and see whether you can get them to self express within the friendly disciplines of what you do. Don't go crazy but, at the same time, don't just hope that people will come to you. Remember that in spite of what you so-called friends say about you, you are a bright bunch of people with community spirit. You have the chance to turn that commitment into practice.
I think it would be unwise of you to promise that in bringing more people into web creativity we will eliminate the self indulgence and the venality which characterise much of the old web as well as the new, but I sense that during the past few years we have all grown a little self satisfied.
I don't want to sound like Marie Antoinette - well, I couldn't even if I wanted to - by saying that nobody should bake internet cake until everybody can bake internet bread; neither am I saying that creators should stop doing interesting things because they will not be universally understood; but what I am saying is that there needs to be bits of the Web which are welcome and where the welcome is being extended by all kinds of people, not just the clever and the creative.
So in closing there are just two important things to say. The first is to thank you for who you are and what you have done. In a sense I'm making this speech to the converted but I still think it needs to be made just to keep us on our toes. So, thank you for caring, for creating, for sharing and for not taking competition more seriously than it should be taken. Secondly, keep your hearts and minds open and develop your capacity to welcome new people into your teams and new people onto your sites.
If you would like to comment on the above keynote, please send an email to humanity@atlas.co.uk