Is it just me, or does Carr need a good editor?
"And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point."
Um, couldn't he have just trimmed his article, a teensy bit? All that
nonsense about quasi-religious longing, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, gets in the way
of what he's really saying, which is that new groupware ventures like
Wikipedia, whatever else they may be, aren't engines for transforming the
work of masses of ordinary people into great writing.
Honestly if I'd been faced with a choice between thoroughly copy editing
Jane Fonda, and reading one of Carr's articles all the way through just
once, I'd go for Jane every time. He could have said it all in three
paragraphs. But I suppose that if you remove the references to mysticism and
evangelism you get down to an observation that's so commonplace that it can
only provoke the response: "so what?"