Web 2.0 Hype or Democracy in Action: Conference Debate

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The debate begins today. The Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0 Conference open and runs until tomorrow. the conference's focus is the developments in the Internet that have taken place over the past few years.

The various web developments have received considerable media attention but, to date, have not been given any serious look by the social sciences.

The purpose of the conference is to begin the process of investigation by social scientists into what is now known as Web 2.0. In particular, the participants will examine the social practices of ‘generating’ and ‘browsing’, ‘tagging’ and ‘feeds’, ‘commenting’ and ‘noting’,‘reviewing’ and ‘rating’, ‘blogging’, ‘mashing-up’ and making ‘friends’

Two of the conference's speakers who taken dramatically opposing views are sure to draw much attention.

Internet entrepreneur turned cultural critic Andrew Keen, who says the revolution of interactivity and user-generated content on the Internet is leading to ‘less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information’ is one of the two.

The other is Charles Leadbeater who argues that the more sources of information available, the more critical people can be.