The polemicist
Saturday, July 28, 2007 at 05:55PM Polemic: an aggressive attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another (M-W.com - professional)
Polemic: An aggressive debate, attack on or refutation of the opinions or principles of another (en.wiktionary.org - amateur and stolen?)
Groucho Marx once quipped, "I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book." While I actually read Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture (Currency, 2007), I may have been so busy mentally writing the review as I read, I wonder if I really comprehended it.
As a self-proclaimed polemicist, Keen sets out to be deliberatively provocative and succeeds. Starting in the introduction by setting up and referring to social web content providers as Huxley's infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters (disgusting that anyone would do this), Keen argues that non-professional content providers, intellectual property thieves, and the new Internet moguls who control Google, YouTube and Facebook are destroying civilization as we know it.
Let's get some of the quibbles out of the way first:
- Despite arguing that edited content must be encouraged and preserved, Keen saves his most virulent criticism for authors appearing in traditional media - Chris Long's book The Long Tail and a Kevin Kelly article appearing in the New York Times Magazine. If the blogarati are so deluded and the professional writers are so saintly, wouldn't you think Keen would have disagreed with the monkeys instead of the blessed?
- Keen attributes all the decline in newspaper publishing, music production and film-making to free amateur content, free services (Craigslist) or stolen intellectual property reducing the profits of the established media companies. He finds no fault with the poor quality products that have been the result of the accountants in these companies making the creative decisions based on profitability. Might it be that people are not watching TV, buying music or getting newspapers because today's TV, music and newspapers have been so starved by bottom-liners that they are not much distinguishable from the amateurs.
- While the first part of the book stays pretty much with the theme of the amateur driving out the professional, Keen digresses in the final chapters into a general condemnation of the Internet itself, trotting the tired old pornography, identity theft, child safety, and lack of privacy stories out just for good measure. Damned by association, I believe this called.
- Much of what Keen is describing is an economic shift - power moving from the traditional media companies to those which are web-based. Is there really any reason I should care that the president of Disney or Gannett is taking home a few hundred thousand less in bonuses this year and the folks at Yahoo or YouTube are taking home more?
Yet I have some of the same concerns Keen shares about the fate of authors, musicians, and newspaper reporters and how they will remunerated for their intellectual creations. Music companies and mainstream publishers do provide the services of development and marketing of talent. (John Perry Barlow and Esther Dyson predicted as early as the mid-90s that digitized creative work was so easy to steal that other forms of income generation would be necessary for artists, writers and musicians.) I would hate to think of a world from which Peter Jackson's work has been replaced by home clips of fart lighting on YouTube.
It's probably in the news are where I share Keen's concerns the most. Society still needs the Third Estate and were professional journalism's power diminish to the point it no longer could be a governmental check, we'll all be in trouble. Of the LWW and my four children, only one takes a print newspaper - and these are educated young people! Professional news is lacking in credibility with lots of people right now who feel the "people" offer a more fair and balanced view. We need to think hard about this one.
My sense is that the more infatuated one is with the Web 2.0, the more important it is one read this book to get a look at the darker side of the changes being wrought. I always find I learn more from critics than I do from friends.
A few take away quotes:
- What happens, you might ask, when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule?...The monkeys take over. p 9
- Wittingly or not, we seek out the information that mirrors back out own biases and opinions and conforms with our distorted versions of reality. p 85
- History has proven that the crowd is not often very wise. After all, many unwise ideas - slavery, infanticide, George W Bush's war in Iraq, Britney Spears - have been extremely popular with the crowd. This is why the arbiters of truth should be the experts - those who speak from a place of knowledge and authority - not the winners of a popularity contest. p. 96
- These days even the clergy are turning into plagiarists. p 144
- Well, the Web 2.0 is the democratization of that Orwellian nightmare; instead of a single all-seeing, all-knowing Orwellian leader, now anyone can be Big Brother. p 177
- Can we really trust society to behave properly in the Wild West culture of the Web 2.0 revolution? p 196
- ...as a parent, I feel we need to enforce the laws [COPA, DOPA] designed to protect our kids from morally corrosive Internet content. p 201
Books 
Reader Comments (5)
It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon, so I'll just pick one quote to comment on, then be off.
"Wittingly or not, we seek out the information that mirrors back our own biases and opinions and conforms with our distorted versions of reality. p 85"
I'll admit that I tend to read bloggers with whom I feel in sych - though even they will occasionally express a point of view different from my own. There are a few that I check out just to keep tabs on how the "other side" thinks/feels. Some of the authors of posts on the Brittanica Blog surely qualify for the latter category. I, of course, follow this pattern no matter in what format the information appears: blog, newspaper, book. Somehow I find it difficult to believe that Mr. Keen doesn't do the same, even if to a lesser degree.
I don't feel that I have a "distorted version of reality", just a personal one.
As for mystery novels...the ones I love to read are a lot less "mindless" than some of Mr. Keen's rants!
Hi Diane,
I suspect that Mr Keen is as guilty of reading only those with whom he agrees as are most of us. Although I admit, I rather like the Britannica Blog - a healthy dose of skepticism at times!
My intelligent fiction writer this week is Daniel Silva. He writes an excellent international thriller.
Thanks for writing in,
Doug
Serendipity. I just wrote about Keen for my LAST (!Hurrah!) paper before I finish my MLIS. You might be interested to read a great exchange between him and David Weinberger (Everything is Miscellaneous) on the Wall Street Journal, if you haven't seen it already.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118460229729267677.html
Hi Jeri,
Thanks for sharing this. Doug 1.0 printed it out to read at home this evening!
Doug
grin--old habits die hard, don't they? I keep wanting to put my Furl bookmarks into folders, though Weinberger would tut tut me! Tags only, and leave 'em in the pile!