Making a big splash lately is “The Cult of the Amateur” by Andrew Keen.
A couple thoughts before I go into analysis.
1. Obviously an appropriation of Leander Khaney’s Cult of Mac (my old editor at Wired).
2. Business Week video interview here.
3. Jeff Howe’s thoughts: Coming from the crowdsourcing angle, Jeff is obviously on the other side of this debate.
5. Lessig’s tears the book apart
4. My initial reaction when I saw Keen in a debate at Personal Democracy Forum.
My favorite panel was the debate on the amateur – whether or not
everyone being able to take part in media is destroying our culture,
with Robert Scoble and Craig Newmark
on one end of the debate, Clay Shriky ridding the middle and Andrew
Keen at the far end. Robert Scoble was hilarious (as I expected).I’ll give Andrew Keen credit for having the balls to say to this crowd
of bloggers that the democratization of media was a bad thing. I kept
waiting for someone to throw rotten produce at him.But the debate seemed like a red herring to me. Should we only have
professionals doing the media or just let the amateurs have it?Why is it an “either-or” decision? …..
So now a bit more.
A friend/colleague from Assignment Zero is throwing around an idea: Responding to Keen’s book with arguments formed by….amateurs. (I’m suggesting Debatepedia, but that might not be the ethos he wants).
Yes. A wikipedia-esque response to Andrew Keen’s thesis. I applaud the creativity. Let’s see if it happens.
I’m still left with one sour spot about Keen’s book. Why is everyone an amateur? At the Future of News Steve Boriss put it best:
Most who write for Old Media are professional journalists, but amateurs
in the topics they write about. By contrast, most of the leading, elite
bloggers are experts in their specialized topic areas, but amateurs in
journalism. Is the public really better off reading amateur-grade
information from journalists rather than professional-grade information
from non-journalists? More to the point, will they prefer it?
And just to go full circle. That seems to be what we experienced at Assignment Zero. As Jeff Howe put it when looking over the 80+ interviews that we conducted:
This is the beauty of open organizational systems. People
self-select, assigning themselves to tasks for which they are
best-suited. Contrast this with the process by which an interviewer is
assigned to interviewee in a closed system (a magazine or newspaper). A
journalist is often chosen to conduct a Q&A with a subject based on
his or her availability. That’s a pretty poor qualification, though
it’s borne of simple necessity. The professional in this closed system
(and I speak from personal experience), often lacks the time it takes
to adequately acquaint oneself with the subject’s work, ideas and
experience. If the resulting product feels a little rote and
indifferent, do you blame the journalist or the system?
But not only did the interviews betray a level of passion and
specialization rarely found in the mainstream media, they were simply
better reads. Magazines and newspapers tend to pasteurize such
interviews to filter out any content that any reader anywhere might
possibly deem offensive or obscure or simply irrelevant. The result is
something that’s leached of idiosyncrasy, complex ideas and the
accidental poetry that arises from an animated conversation.
Dave, do you remember the moment, on the panel, that I pointed out that it didn’t look like Keen did any fact checking… and he admitted that was the case?
Craig
WOW!
First of all. You are Craig Newmark! Thank’s for leaving a comment. Now I can say that Craig Newmark has read my blog. That alone is cool.
Second: I do remember that moment. In fact, Lessig did a really good job just doing some fact checking on the parts of Keen’s book that focused on him.
My friend who is trying to organize a wiki-response to Keen’s book is aware of this and is definitly going to dedicate one wave of response only to fact-checking.
Also. ummmm… Thanks for that list you made. I use it all the time.
Hi Dave.
Keen’s business model is to synthetically polarize an issue and then ride the unpopular end of it.
And by mentioning him in any way shape or form, you (and Dan Gilmor and all the other distributed journalism bloggers and that stupid panel at PDF where Keen pretended to agree with me because he knew arguing a real point would dilute/expose the childish character he is playing) are perpetuating this business model.
(as is, arguably, this comment I am making right now).
Sigh.
-John
John
I totally agree — he is using and abusing the echo chamber of the blogosphere — and there is no way for us to ignore it either. Silence feels like giving in, but the more we blog about how much we disagree — the more books he sells.
Oh but there IS. Think of all the time that people have spent talking and writing about this idiot. We could spend that time building tools and having conversations instead.
If we “defend” ourselves we implicitly give him power, because it demonstrates that his argument is valid or relevant.
I know that there are those who would argue that if we say nothing, his voice will be the only one that is heard. I feel that those people are projecting one-to-many rules onto the many-to-many space.