Two views on an online society

The San Francisco Chronicle interviews two recognized Web thinkers, Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson and Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur." They have very different views about what the Web will mean for society:

Q: I wanted to wrap things up by asking where are we going to be in 10 years and where is this movement taking us?

Anderson: I think that the genie is out of the bottle and is going to stay out of the bottle, that people given a voice won't give it up. The tools of the spoken text and video and music and democracy are only going to get more powerful and we're going to have more freedom to do so, and I suspect that more people will find a voice. That's a trend that's not going to stop.

How it changes our culture overall as we become less and less of a cultural lockstep of shared culture and more and more of a tribal culture where we have our niche interests? I think the jury is out as to what that's going to do to us.

Keen: I think we are seeing more fragmentation. I think we are seeing more anger. I think we are seeing this radicalization of culture and life. I think that technology seems to be almost coincidental and has exploded around this at the same time that Americans are very angry about many different things.

It has nothing to do with blogs or technology, but all these things are coming together in a way that concerns me and I think that if our traditional institutions of politics or culture or economics continue to be undermined by this personalization and radical individualization of things, then I think we will be in trouble.

I think that if the Internet becomes more and more of a soapbox to trash elected politicians and mainstream media figures and to conduct these witch hunts on anyone who ever makes a mistake, then I think that eventually we are going to find ourselves in a world where we're just going to be staring at a mirror.

It's going to result in what I call cultural and economic anarchy, and I don't think that is a good thing. I think it will result in less community, which is ironic given the fact that this thing is supposed to be about community.