Don’t arbite me
posted in Uncategorized |Kent Newsome says that Andrew Keen, author of the newly released “The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture
I’m sorry, Kent. I can’t resist.
Publisher’s Weekly had this to say:
Keen’s relentless “polemic” is on target about how a sea of amateur content threatens to swamp the most vital information and how blogs often reinforce one’s own views rather than expand horizons. But his jeremiad about the death of “our cultural standards and moral values” heads swiftly downhill. Keen became somewhat notorious for a 2006 Weekly Standard essay equating Web 2.0 with Marxism; like Karl Marx, he offers a convincing overall critique but runs into trouble with the details. Readers will nod in recognition at Keen’s general arguments—sure, the Web is full of “user-generated nonsense”!—but many will frown at his specific examples, which pretty uniformly miss the point. It’s simply not a given, as Keen assumes, that Britannica is superior to Wikipedia, or that record-store clerks offer sounder advice than online friends with similar musical tastes, or that YouTube contains only “one or two blogs or songs or videos with real value.” And Keen’s fears that genuine talent will go unnourished are overstated: writers penned novels before there were publishers and copyright law; bands recorded songs before they had major-label deals. In its last third, the book runs off the rails completely, blaming Web 2.0 for online poker, child pornography, identity theft and betraying “Judeo-Christian ethics.”
Keen’s thrust is that we need gatekeepers, and those gatekeepers are what keep “culture” alive.
He participated in a “salon” back in March, 2006, in which he presented these ideas; then he wrote an article that expanded on them. Then, realizing he had hit a vein of gold by the uproar these generated, he decided to expand even further and product this book.
I haven’t read it–sorry. I may borrow it from the library. I’m not feeling generous enough to spend my dollars on my own copy, because when I read the quotes, the interviews, I just feel like gnashing my teeth.
Contrary to Keen’s opinion, there are musicians who are making not by having any involvement in the established music industry, but by heading out on their own, using the internet.
Contrary to Keen’s opinion, not every message board that features anonymity turns into “abuse and cretinism”. Oh, no doubt many do–but if one isn’t interested in “abuse and cretinism”, one stops frequenting the sites that foment that attitude (such as the message boards on MSNBC).
Keen thinks that the only way to keep beauty and culture alive is for some select group to act as the arbiters. He sneers at Wikipedia and cheers the online Brittanica–yet, when the tsunami hit, Wikipedia was a great resource, and same when the Virginia Tech shootings were going down.
Thank you very much, Andrew, but I don’t need a gatekeeper. I’m perfectly capable of finding things on the Internet that appeal to me, and I do find, quite often, that the articles that are most linked to tend to interest me. I find that the blogs that are linked to by other bloggers whose writing I respect tend to interest me. I may be low-brow, but I find that the videos of people playing with mints and soda pop tend to interest me. (And how different are the mint/soda pop videos from Rube Goldberg’s intricate cartoons?)
People used to complain that the penny-dreadfuls were bringing down “culture”–yet Dickens’ works, now considered “classics”, were first brought to us by serialization in cheap tabloids.
What is thought of as “culture” changes as the world changes. No doubt the folks who rhapsodize about the internet bringing democratization to the world are overstating things. No doubt that the internet brings p0rn and sleaze and abusive behavior to new heights. But…I still don’t want someone else telling me what to read, what to watch, what to think.
And I certainly don’t want Andrew Keen telling me, thankyewverramuch.
Technorati: Andrew Keen, internet
