response to keen

so maybe this post won't have anything to do with football or alcohol but it is still class related.

i was talking to a friend about the keen book, portraying keen's main points about the internet and its 'flattening' of the culture.
my friend vehemently disagreed with keen's points about "too many voices" and i started to see the other side of the argument in fresher terms. and here i've composed a list of points that we were discussing, sort of combating keen's pessimistic view on how we handle the internet. first and foremost, it's obvious how much shit is on the internet. there's no way to really defend that.

my friend, Sam is his name, made the point that yes, we do have the ability to read/write that we just ate a sandwich, something ultimately trivial and pointless, but don't we also have the ability not to read that? isn't it up to us to filter out the good and bad? To say that the internet is ruining us is to say that we don't have the ability to filter out the shit from the good stuff -- we can find websites on the internet that are good, thought provoking, and artistic, and yes we may have to find them.. but isn't that the same anywhere?

and what's our alternative? mainstream media? isn't that why there are so many voices in the internet in the first place -- because we think mainstream media sucks? look at postman -- he's been criticizing the media in the television age -- you could view the internet as adding to the mess but in some cases it also seems like a solution where we can finally look up what we want to hear, not just talking heads.

another thing: who cares about the movie industry? instead of making double digit billions of dollars, now they have to many single digits. boo fucking hoo. i have a limited amount of economical knowledge, but it seems to me that if any jobs are being lost its from the middle class. you really think the guys at the top are making any less money than before? they're the greedy ones, not the working class who feels unjust for paying $10 for a movie. and yeah, the movie prices probably started raising as piracy became more prominent, but like i said, i don't think the millionaires running the film industry and taking any slack. they're probably just fucking up the quality of movies by cutting out the people who make it happen, as opposed to lowering the paychecks of the people who fund it.

and as far as music stealing goes, i can sympathize, but i think it's naive to think that record stores were going to stay open when the internet came about. obviously, in a capitalistic society, things are going to run cheaper and easier... when a record company takes part in a capitalistic society and then gets upset when they get run out of business because of newer technology -- again, boo fucking hoo. you should've known what you were getting into when you agreed to become a corporation. you should've known better to participate in an economy based on the phrase "time=money". don't criticize the evils of capitalism when you are inherently part of the system.

well there's my negative rant of the day. sorry for being so pessimistic, but i'm sick & grumpy.