Web 2.0 Expo Day 1

I am currently sitting in the morning session at the Web 2.0 Expo about Community Evangelism. The speaker just raised an interesting question: is it possible for Web media to become as timeless and valuable as a book, song, move, or other classic work of literature. The reality is that we do not frequently revisit a YouTube video, or a blog, or something of the like for its artistic value, unless perhaps it is something we decide to share with a friend, in which case we enjoy it again as we see our friend laugh or cry or smile at the same content that gave us that pleasure.

Yet it is not quite the same. I cannot think of a time when I contemplated the depth of a 5 minute YouTube clip, or a 500 word blog article, no matter how insightful. I haven't encountered anything on the Internet that has impacted my life as did Fyodor Doestoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I am not sure where the resolution to this is, but I hope for the sake of culture and society that we figure it out, for as we turn our time and attention away from classic literature, and book form itself, we need to nevertheless harness the deep creative powers of the human spirit in our new technological era.

More to come from the Web 2.0 Expo....