One of the reasons our public debates go careening off at odd angles is that we, and especially Americans, have all the historical sense of a colony of cherrystone clams. (To steal a phrase from the greatest bathroom reading every written: Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings)
The result is that one of our culture’s most popular characters is the Viewer with Alarm. Indeed some authors, notably the late Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders, etc. ad nauseum) have made long and prolific careers out of Viewing With Alarm. This has the advantage of providing a dose of unintentional humor when one comes across their forlorn relics on dusty shelves 30 years later. However the amusement is tinged with regret when the reader realizes that people not only bought this stuff, they bought into the arguments as well.
The instant Viewer With Alarm is one Andrew Keen, a persistent critic of Web 2.0, whose work, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture is providing a rich source of blog fodder all across the spectrum.
Because democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent. As I noted earlier it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions.
As a Viewer With Alarm, Keen is long on hyperventilation and rather short on substance. Lawrence Lessig, one of Keen’s targets, calls his book an exercise in unintentional parody. Before shredding Keen’s critique of his position, Lessig summarizes one of his central arguments thusly:
“(Keen) tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false.”
If Keen really believes that, or anything close to it, he is truly one of the great blithering idiots of the 21st Century.
However anyone who’s ever been a professional journalist knows, blithering idiocy has never been a bar to success as a Viewer with Alarm. Some people are bound to take you seriously.
One such person is Tony Long over at Wired
“But one of Keen’s central arguments — that the internet, by its all-inclusive nature and easy access, opens the door to amateurism-as-authority while at the same time devaluing professional currency — deserves a full airing. Basically, I think he’s right to criticize what he calls the “cut and paste” ethic that trivializes scholarship and professional ability, implying that anybody with a little pluck and the right technology can do just as well.”
To give Keen credit, he has noted one of the consequences of the internet as a medium. Just about anyone can use it and much of what is produced is narcissistic drivel. (The proof is about two mouse clicks away from you.) That conclusion is, perhaps, worthy of a bumper sticker (mine reads “The experiment has begun: A million monkeys at a million typewriters. We call it the Usenet.” Obviously it’s a very old bumper sticker.) Stretching it into a book is the intellectual equivalent of homeopathic medicine.
And that dumps us right in the middle of the clam bed.
What people like Keen utterly miss, is the reaction of the audience. The audience adapts to the medium, which historically has meant that they have learned to analyze what they’re reading, hearing and seeing.
If you approach the internet with the same skill set people used to apply to newspapers, you’re in a lot of trouble. Just as you would have been in the 19th Century if you had read the new penny press with the same degree of credulity that people applied to the old-line newspapers. Or if a 16th Century reader applied the same degree of belief and acceptance to the mass of newly printed religious tracts they he or she did to what the priest said at Mass.
But they didn’t and we don’t, at least not for long. We, or most of us, are learning to exercise critical thinking skills to evaluate what we’re finding. We are learning to ignore the junk and to sift some semblance of truth from the fiction.
There’s something else at work here as well. That is the growing ‘professionalisation of amateurism’. In other words, even amateurs can learn and they generally do.
This sort of phenomenon that has Keen’s knickers in a knot happens nearly every time a new medium opens up channels of discourse. There is a huge outpouring of mostly really dreadful stuff as people take advantage of the new opportunities. Some of the stuff remains resolutely dreadful. But some of it becomes excellent.
Early in my journalistic career, the availability of cheap offset presses and photolithography as an alternative to hot metal type meant anyone could publish a ‘newspaper’ with little capital investment and even less skill. A lot of people did and the ‘underground press’ was born. It was rife with all the evil effects of amateurism Keen Views With Alarm. However mixed in with the dreck was an increasing amount of good work — what eventually became known as ‘alternative journalism’.
Similarly, when personal computers and cheap (relatively!) laser printers made desktop publishing possible, much of the early work was stomach-churningly awful. But it also opened up new channels of communication and became the foundation for the way we produce and distribute printed information today.
So once more we will see the cycle played out. And once more, despite people like Keen, the result will be ultimately beneficial.
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