I knew if I waited long enough some one else would say it better than I could. Basically I’ve had a kind of unease about the way social spaces in the Web 2.0 world are being sold in terms of business goals, of efficiency and the free market (treated as unquestionably a good thing as ever) etc.

Anyway…

The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0

What has changed is that these otherwise secluded and organic realms of social interaction are now the focus of obsessive technological innovation and commercial interest. The same technological zeal and business acumen that once was applied to improving the way we buy a book or pay our car tax is now being applied to the way we engage in social and cultural activities with others.

In short, efficiency gains are no longer being sought only in economic realms such as retail or public services, but are now being pursued in parts of our everyday lives where previously they hadn’t even been imagined. Web 2.0 promises to offer us ways of improving the processes by which we find new music, new friends, or new civic causes. The hassle of undesirable content or people is easier to cut out. We have become consumers of our own social and cultural lives.
…
a crucial aspect of human relations … is missed out and threatened as a result. This is that the means by which people discover, choose or access something can very often contribute its value. People are not only outcome-oriented.

Obviously the comments in response to the article are mainly variations on the standard “technology == neutral” type nonsense. Technology obviously isn’t neutral it’s designed with a function in mind. For some reason people seem to confuse technology with the laws of physics. I think this is a similar problem to the one mentioned in the article above, kind of an interpretive scale mistake (there must be amore elegant term); trying to explain a phenomenon at the wrong scale - like trying to explain natural selection at the level of chemical reactions, or technological change at the level of physics, or social benefit and quality in terms of number of connections made, messages sent or otehr such metrics.

Treating techology as morally neutral and an inevitable product of nature is, I guess, the kind of position that leads to the idea that because something is technologically possible it must be permissable, a view which is totally pervasive in tech culture (extremist objections to copyright etc.), it ignores the fact that plenty of stuff that’s possible isn’t permissable, acts of violence etc.

Anyway, enough digression. Lets look at something that Bertrand Russell back in the day (1937):

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy.

In Praise Of Idleness