Killing Our Culture?: Blogging and Web 2.0
Pop Culture, Rant January 16th, 2008I was reading extracts from the book “The Cult of the Amateur” by Andrew Keen. He states that
Moreover, the free, user-generated content spawned and extolled by the Web 2.0 revolution is decimating the ranks of our cultural gatekeepers, as professional[s] [...] and other purveyors of expert information are being replaced [...] by amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun moviemakers, and attic recording artists. Andrew Keen
The full extract is available on the BBC.
Andrew Keen makes a simple but fundamental mistake: he equates the professional with competence and the amateur with incompetence. This is so obviously untrue that I find it hard to know where to begin with counter examples! 
Many examples are stated in the report from Demos titled “The Pro-Am Revolution”
The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We’re witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought. Demos
Obviously, if I agreed with Andrew Keen, I would not be writing these words on this blog!
Anti Citizen One
PS I finally finished History of Western Philosophy! Hooray!
January 16th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
I saw an interview with this guy on newsnight some time back and my immediate impression was that he was mistaken. Glad to see you’ve read the book and my initial concerns were accurate.
You are right, the big mistake is to equate amateur with incompetence etc…
To go pomo for a second, clearly this is the death throws of the proffessionals discourse of power… he is feeling challenged… what by? Possibly the fact that intelligence is not defined by professional status – that many non-professionals take a sincere, deep and lifelong interest into something and can become quite expert in it, without it ever being anything more than a hobby.
What about Patrick Moore the astronomer? He is an amateur, and a recognised expert in lunar observation, all without formal tertiary level tuition.
The one sympathy I have with Keen, although this is not the point he is making, is that the growth in information technology has made the fallacy of authority a serious problem. It is not just intellectual laziness, but a genuine perception by those who do not research critically enough, that because it is published on a neat/nice blog the author must be some form of authority.
But you will never eradicate this error from the top-down. The responsibility for accurately percieving authority belongs to the individual.