Ryan MacMillan

…or at t’Silicon Valley, anyway. Yesterday’s Observer (get me and my instant response blogging hem-hem) has a very amusing article about Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy (catchy, non?). Keen, who was present for the first internet bust and still lives out in San Francisco,

questions the euphoria surrounding the rise of citizen journalism, online communities such as MySpace and user-generated websites including online encyclopedia Wikipedia and video-sharing site YouTube… (he) presents a dystopian vision in which people endlessly Google themselves and expertise counts for nothing; online communities gather merely to confirm their own prejudices; internet television purports to showcase amateur talent but is dominated by corporate marketing; newspapers are driven to the wall by online advertising and news sites edited at the whimsical click of a mouse; and knowledge of history and literature becomes smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers.

Apres moi, la deluge and all that, eh? Keen has been accused of “militant snobbishness” by academic Jeff Jarvis:

In Web 2.0, Keen sees the means of flattening culture. I see the means of the people speaking.

Yes, but should they be allowed to? There’s a war on, you know… I can see Jarvis’s point about democracy - of course it’s great that we can all create our own content and say whatever we like online. But, in all honesty, most of what people say online is crap (takes quick look at RMM blogging poilicy) really not very good at all (including this post, quite possibly). The most attracive plank of Keen’s article, to my mind, is his defence of expertise:

I’m nostalgic for the world I grew up in where there was a clear distinction between author and audience. I’m not attracted or impressed by the idea of collapsing that distinction. It’s hard to be good at what you’re doing, it requires expertise. In the same way that not everyone should be doctors or teachers or astronauts, not everyone should be an author. Most people do not have anything interesting to say.

That’s a terribly unfashionable thing to say, but I kind of know what he means. I miss expertise - in context. I get honestly depressed when I hear BBC newsreaders (and the BBC website) asking viewers to text in and “have your say”. Perhaps I’m being militantly snobbish, but I don’t particularly care what Alan from Leamington Spa has to say about the Palestinian crisis and I don’t think the BBC should, either. I want the news, not opinion dressed up as democratic particpation. On the other hand, if Alan from Leamington Spa has recently bought a particular wifi unit from Amazon and has posted a review telling us how crummy it is, then I am interested - if I’m thinking about buying a wifi unit, anyway. Alan has no experience of Palestine and thus I am utterly distinterested in his point of view in terms of the news. However, he has experience of the wifi unti and so I want to know if it works etc - which he can tell me.
The awful truth might be that the vast majority of user-generated content is just empty calories. Keen goes so far as to suggest that the whole web2.0-democratic-participation model is a money-making sham:

The most successful videos on YouTube tend to be advertising, not real content. The idea is that anyone can be a Spielberg or Hitchcock, but it’s actually a freeway to run ads. The big companies are the only ones who win because they dress up their marketing as amateur so that it’s like one big commercial break.

Hello, Norm Chomsky! Can we all say “false consciousness”? This is the kind of critique that one used to find in Gramscian Marxist sociology texts. If nothing else, it’s refreshing to get a different perspective to the relentless optimism of most web2.0 writing. Or am I just being a snob, again?