"It's All about Us"

In Steven Johnsons short essay "It's All about Us" he talks about how the internet has exploded into something that lets every person who wants to have a voice. " Web 2.0 s made up of ordinary people: hobbyists, diarists, armchair pundits, people adding their voice to the Web's great evolving conversation for the sheer love of it"(Par 1). Americans live in a world today that is over ran by the internet and we live in a country where we can find almost anything we want by just typing in a few key words of we can type things with almost no consequences at the same time. Johnson describes these people as amateurs which there very much are and brings in the statement "For some, it has power-to-the-people authenticity. For others, it signals the end of quality and professionalism"(Par 2). For some of us we may know a lot about a certain topic, we can take me for example, I played baseball for a number of years and was a pitcher. I attended camps and was trained by players that had a vast majority of knowledge in all the things that you have to do to become an outstanding player. Now if I wanted to go and make a blog on the basics of pitching and being an amateur I could very easily teach people things but in no way know 100% of what you need to know to become an effective pitcher. Some may see this as something that really helps or some guy could come in and just say that all these techniques were false and say that it was no were near quality. One major concern there is with all this writing such as blogging and Wikipedia, being that some people just plainly don't know and are just blowing smoke to make themselves believe they are a professional at a certain subject. But then as you think Johnson is going to take this side that this is such a bad thing he claims "The fact is that most user-created content on the Web is not challenging the authority of a traditional expert. It's working in a zone where there are no experts or where the users themselves are the experts"(Par 5). Then Johnson brings into conversation the biggest places of dairy-style pages are webpage’s such as LiveJournal and Myspace, and then goes in by stating that they are not challenging anyone they are just writing about what is happening in their lives and says that most of the photographers on Flickr have no true dream of becoming the next Annie Leibovitz. It is just their way of showing pictures to their family and friends. I post pictures on my facebook because they look awesome and I want people to know what I have been up to, not to make money off of and be famous off of. Johnson helped launch a new service by the name of Outside. In. The service is compiled of a bunch of these ordinary people blogging about what happens in these real communities where people like you and I live in, talking about such things as the playground that is going to open up or about the No Child Left Behind service and the affects it has had on the public schools. These people are the real professionals and there is a reason why you don't see reporters in these places talking about what is happening because it is something that they just have not a lot of knowledge in. If these reporters can ignore this then why can't we ignore things that we have virtually no idea in? If we can cut all the just absurd things from the internet such as statements saying the earth is flat then maybe the everyday bloggers who actually do know something about certain subjects will not always be under the magnified glass about what they are writing about.