THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR: HOW TODAY'S
INTERNET IS KILLING OUR CULTURE
By Andrew Keen
The Cult of the Amateur is one of those books that are a pleasure to review
because they put forth their arguments in such a clear, direct, uncompromising
and totally unbalanced way. One can condense the book's message in a sentence:
The public, open nature of the Internet is destroying our culture because it has
allowed for the triumph of "ignorance, egoism, bad taste, and mob
rule" over professionalism, expertise, truth, and intellectual standards.
There are no cultural gatekeepers online. Indeed, the gates have been torn from their
hinges by hundreds of millions of monkeys with keyboards.
Such a judgment is unfair, as well as being old. The kind of downhill slide into a democracy of taste and judgment that
Keen attributes to the advent of the Internet has been going on for a while now
with regard to almost every aspect
of our culture that technology has allowed us to produce cheaper, faster, and
more disposable versions of. Fast food is an obvious example. In all human
history we have never been able to make food as bad, as downright
unhealthy, as the stuff many of us eat today. A mass consumer society demands
quantity, affordability, and convenience in its cultural goods - not oil
paintings but cell-phones that take pictures.
In other words, the Internet as we have it today is less a cause than a
symptom, a reflection of larger historical currents. This is clear from a more
objective look at the evidence. Keen is relentlessly biased in overplaying the
failures of the Internet and underemphasizing problems with more traditional
sources of authority. Yes, Wikipedia has its share of problems. But, as studies
have shown, for the most part it is no less reliable for the average user than
the stalwart Encyclopedia Britannica. And of course it's far more
accessible. Keen's denigrating of online sources for information is especially
churlish given his own reliance on Web-based sources that are only revealed in
endnotes, and which he seems to have cherry-picked in order to fashion his
own misleading arguments. This is a little grating coming from someone only too
happy to explicitly identify himself as one of the book-worthy talent elite.
Then there is the issue of downplaying the failures of the mainstream
media. Given all of the embarrassments over the way the American media in
particular handled the reporting leading up to the invasion of Iraq, as well as
the outing of such prominent frauds as Jayson Blair, one would have thought the
lesson was to look on all news with a more critical eye. But Keen never mentions
Judith Miller, and only refers to Blair as an example of how the mainstream
media got it right by having to publicly account for their shortcomings.
This isn't good enough given his emphasis on the importance of editors and
gatekeepers. Nothing he says addresses the problem of systemic corporate bias in
the media, which the Internet at least provides some alternative to (for the
time being). And much of
what he deplores about online news and political blogs - the emphasis on opinion
and personality, the rise of infotainment and fake news - was going strong in
print and on television long before the Internet took off. If anything the
Internet was following the mainstream's lead, and for the same reasons: it made
the news cheaper to produce and more entertaining. You can't blame Fox News on
the Internet.
Keen does, however, make one important point. This has to do with the
cannibal economy of the Internet, the way it has grown to dominate the
traditional "old media" cultural
landscape by raping that landscape of both its content and its advertising
revenue. Which is a big problem.
Keen is clear on the fact
that culture follows the money. And he's right. The problem is that there is no
money in the content of culture, in being a creative, cultural producer. The great
Internet successes on the Internet are not in the content business. Starting at
the top with Google, which is described, accurately, as "a parasite."
The content of the top Web 2.0 Internet brands - Google, MySpace, Yahoo!, FaceBook,
YouTube, Blogger, even the film review resource Rotten Tomatoes - is all outsourced or
user-generated. These sites produce virtually nothing of their own, they simply exist as platforms. And they are the
new Internet economy's big winners.
Content, then, is for losers. Content is crap. Copyright on the Internet? Why
even bother? Mere content isn't worth it.
This is the real threat to our
culture, not the assault on our traditional institutions. Those institutions
can, at least in theory, transform themselves into more viable forms. The
problem is that the Internet represents perhaps the final step in the process of
our rejection of the very notion of culture having any value at all. This is a
disillusionment the human spirit will find hard to survive.
Notes:
Review first published online December 6, 2007.
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