MediaVidea

For your consideration: The ‘1%creator vs. the 99% consumer’ meme

"Ozmandias, don't be too proud."

I have seen the ‘web 2.0 as time-waster meme’ grow fast these couple of days – people busying themselves with dissing the new habits:

- monitoring social news sites
- exploring Del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati tags.
- watching the videos on Youtube and others
- reading the latest celeb/gadget dirt on blogs
- commenting on the latest political/techie opinions and memes (like the present web 2.0 one)
- trolling and spamming Myspace, Orkut, Facebook and others.
- using the Gtalk embed in Gmail thoroughout the day.
- checking out the latest distracters, Twitter and Tumbler.

Aaron Swartz, Reddit co-founder writes about the ‘the 1% creator and 99% consumer issue’:

Technology was supposed to let us solve … problems. But technology never solves things by itself. At bottom, it requires people to sit down and build tools that solve them. Which, as long as programmers are all competing to create the world's most popular timewaster, it doesn't seem like anyone is going to do.

However, all this not new. The 99% is always a consumer. Our media diet has changed with technology, that’s all there is to it.

What do 7 billion humans do to pass time? Bertrand Russell said that the greatest challenge of humanity is to deal with boredom. Russell thought that a reason we wage wars was because we do not get ample opportunities to sing, dance and play.

At best, most top paying jobs do not require full-time physical labor. Who best to endorse it than the (yet another) batch from top business schools vying for investment banking jobs? When we are not working, we are traveling. Again, how do we pass time if we do not have to dispose of e-mail spam or work at a presentation (I love this cliché. The hero working at a presentation to save the company? Yes , that one.)

One could go on and on.

The 1% should be happy for the 99% who who often pay their bills.
You don’t fear the 99% - they are not the Persians of “300”.

Labels: web 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 11:43 AM