I’m happy you’re so interested in the ethical quandaries raised the adoption of social software, though. The place I might start, though, is with some general theory of virtue. You cite to Veblen and Arendt in the OP — those two had two very different notions of value.

Questions of new technology and ethics push us to come up with some kind of position with what our proper goals should be — only if we share a sense of what it means to have time well spent can we know what it means to waste time blogging. Or commenting on blogs — even worse!

As an academic, I am totally thrilled by the “access to obscure forms of knowledge and expertise”–I remember recently settling an armchair debate on early 20th century refrigeration by finding a 1922 treatise on ice hauling on Google Books.

However, to what extent does the experience of intellectuals on the web bias (positively) their view of its overall social impact? As the Pew blogs study showed, most of the blogs out there are pretty inane navel gazing….or worse:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/95094-screaming-in-digital-the-new-media-generations-inner-war/

“In order to enter the ‘information era’ as people, existing on Facebook requires one to turn ones life into information. Unfortunately, the fundamental commonality of human experience means that it becomes extremely difficult to make your information particularly different from a million other users.”

“The response to decaying avenues of self-expression came in the largely unsurprising explosion of Twitter. Twitter is Facebook’s polar opposite, in which users are encouraged to write 140 character ‘tweets’ that describe the minutiae of their daily lives. Twitter allows people to utterly indulge in the business of self-representation, with any potential thought being fair game for a ‘tweet’.”

“It is an insular world, in which minutiae is glorified, recorded, photographed and celebrated. Lacking even the narrative structure of a diary, Twitter is an unfiltered stream of information – self-reflection in its purest form. In the postmodern era, selfhood is already considered by many to be fragmented and unstable – Twitter directly reflects this idea by presenting the dissonant randomness of consciousness in an observable format. ”

And even when it rises above this, doesn’t it often play into a new panopticon of manipulation and control:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2009/06/duty-to-tweet.html

the Web puts us in a much better place, *by any sort of reasonable economic measurement*

Personally, despite anecdotal evidence, I doubt that Twitter and Facebook are doing a great deal to aid the economy or even to build social capital. They are changing some of the ways that people socialize and share information, but much of that was already covered in early discussions of, e.g., usenet and listservs.

I find this sort of thing interesting, personally. That conference looks interesting too.

On a side point, one incredible benefit of the Web to productivity has to be the way it provides access to obscure forms of knowledge and expertise. Today, I know I must not be alone in my conviction that the answer to almost any pressing question requiring human expertise is only a few clicks away. There was a time, not so many years ago, that if I wanted to know more about the history of X place or how Z worked, I would assume that it would take far too long to find out. Now I know that if I want to know, I can know — and, in cases where I need to know, I learn. Repeat that understanding throughout human civilization, and I think the Web (including 2.0) puts us in a much better place than we were before.