After the visionaries come the doom-mongerers

I guess it was bound to happen. A story on BBC News today talks about the perils of web 2.0 and that it is bad for creating a “mob mentality and digital Maoism”.

I suppose I can see the point being made -lots of faceless individuals with an opinion but no identity so little way of checking credibility (forgive the bad paraphrasing). But why is (what is sometimes referred to as) citizen journalism any different to more traditional journalism in that respect?

We have always had faceless individuals with big opinions. Anyone reading or listening and blindly accepting everything as the gospel truth is an idiot, whether they are Daily Mail readers or subscribing to RSS feeds for someone’s blog ramblings. Surely the concern should be about the gormless followers rather than the contributors?

Most worrying of all is that some are now talking about web 3.0… have we learnt nothing from the software industry..?!