Mark Baur's Blog

I really don’t like that meme. It’s been applied to too much by too many and might as well just be synonymous with “new and improved”. Sure, there’s plenty of transformative stuff going on under the designation, but also plenty of misdirection to cloak the old in the new. Kind of like, if you have to announce that you’re cool, you’re probably not. Which reminds me, my boss had something to say about the relevance of the “I hate memes” meme…so I’ll just leave it at that. Maybe it’s not such a big deal.

On the other hand, maybe it is a big deal. Maybe the essence of “being” 2.0 is so lost on certain audiences, or has become so warped, that crucial distinctions are treated as eccentric nuances, and alternatives are weighed against false assumptions. On that note, let me first explain my choice of title for this post. It is intended to invoke the First Principles of the liberal democratic state, but also embodies a wicked false choice that too often baffles the public mind. Once convinced of the primacy of one over the other, it proves immensely difficult to be pursuaded otherwise — and yet the compromise often fabricated between these, as opposing forces, distorts the fact that they are constitutive elements of one and the same just society.

Now, back to the real point. I remember reading about this at the time, and today an individual whom I don’t know — but whose commentary I read regularly — pointed me to it again: the patently LEAST self-aware social media shot in the dark yet. Now, to be fair, there is an angle to that story about technological cooperation for economic stabilization, and on and on, so it might be snarky to use it as a straw man, but the red flag here seems to be that implementations of the thing are being mistaken, willfully or not, for the real thing. That is to say, understanding what it means, at a constitutive level, to make organizations and institutional knowledge as fluid as the Web, let alone figuring out the covenants of rapid data that Wells and Drapeau mention, often seems to get lost in the discourse. Sure, public platforms are great watering holes of information, but they’re not the source of the rain. I’m afraid that certain circles are setting themselves up for a series of false choices if the issue du jour goes no deeper than figuring out how to build a fancy social media shell around a hollow core.

Bottom line, I guess, is that you don’t get your 2.0 merit badge for getting yourself a Facebook account. Now, I’m off to check on my Twitters, so I’ll see you on the Web.