This morning, I listened to an IT Conversations podcast, “Tech Nation” featuring an interview with Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, and it’s been a while since I’ve been this angry listening to a podcast. His interview is one long attack on amateur content creators, by someone who appears to believe in the concept of a cultural gatekeeper, v.s the chaos of the voice of the ordinary citizen, and every criticism he levies against Web 2.0 can be applied even more directly against the mainstream media.
Web 2.0 is called “dangerous” as it undermines authority and professional standards.” Given how docile and obedient the U.S. media has become, in its apparent worship of authority, to not undermine authority to my mind would be even more dangerous. And as far as professional standards go, when I look at what passes for journalism in most mainstream media, I see hacks, shills and whores, or celebrity journalists who make themselves the story. His accusation of Web 2.0 as a wet dream for spinners and PR people is particularly stupifying, given the prevalence of the professional spinner (and the credulous Barbie/Ken Doll talking head “journalist” being manipulated) in mainstream media. He attacks the anonymity of Web 2.0, while at the same time ignoring the fact of the unknown and often largely anonymous levers of power behind mainstream media. He talks about Web 2.0 being “spin, lies and innuendo.” I guess he hasn’t watched Fox News recently.
The only thing Keen says that I agree with is the problem of media illiteracy, but even here, what he then goes on to say leaves me scratching me head. He accuses Web 2.0 of needing news to be “easy to digest, and chunkable,” but he seems to have forgotten that it was television, not the Internet that invented the sound bite as the staple of modern day journalism; Shallow coverage of hard news arose long before the Internet became mainstream. He also claims that there is reliability in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that one doesn’t find in the Internet, and here he is correct, but maybe not in the way he thinks — mainstream media is reliable in the sense that Authority can rely on it to serve its interests, as opposed to the interests of the average citizen.
The pattern of accusing Web 2.0 of the sins of mainstream media continues when Keen warns of an Internet where everything is essentially advertising, due to the blurring of the line between editorial content and advertising. blurring of editorial and advertising. How is that different from mainstream media today? I few years ago I saw a study shown how drastically the percentage of “hard” news vs lifestyle/entertainment news had fallen, and it is in the latter kind of news where this blurring is even more prominent.
He also entirely misses the point when he discusses the “accountability” of the professional media. A mainstream media organization is accountable to its shareholders (if it is a publicly traded company) or its owners; it owes nothing to society in general, and to think otherwise is to be dangerously naive.
Perhaps the most dangerous and disturbing part of what Keen says is the way he uses the word amateur; it has a strong pejorative whiff about it, and he exalts professional journalists in comparison, saying that because they are paid, they will be held to a higher standard. The word amateur derives from the Latin amare, “to love.” In this sense of the word, an amateur is doing something for the love if it, not just going through the motions to bring home a paycheque.
If culture ceases to have any sense of “vox populi” about it, it ceases to be culture, and simply becomes a means of control. The image I get is one of a cemetery, or an old-fashioned museum. The kind of “anarchy” Keen fears is only threatening to to the authoritarian elite; for the rest of us, the chaos is merely a noisy and vibrant marketplace of ideas, and I for one will take the market place of ideas, as the only way of preserving culture as a dynamic and vibrant birthright of all humanity.
Tags: Web 2.0 Keen Media
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