Better Dialogue or Louder Yelling
Andrew Keen is hitting some nerves with his book – Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. The premise of the book is that experts and professionals perform valuable functions in weeding out what is worthy and what is not, so that non-experts may then consume that expert-filtered content. By replacing those experts with rubbish content on the Internet, Keen’s theory goes, the Internet harms society.
(Interestingly, this is a point raised in the comments to my last post: broader political participation is not beneficial, if people have no idea what they’re doing.)
Tongue firmly in cheek, Larry Lessig writes one of the more brutal reviews I’ve ever read, arguing that Keen is intentionally and subversively trying to prove (contrary to his stated thesis) that intermediaries are of limited worth, since Keen himself passed such a bad book by the intermediaries at Doubleday who decided to print it. Ouch.
I’m glad to see that Jeff Jarvis has agreed to debate Keen. As I argued a few weeks ago, Keen clearly intends to be incendiary, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t raise points that should be considered. We should be asking ourselves whether we’re using the Internet to do good things or just to do bad things “better.”
Along those lines, I am interesting to watch the tone of the Utah blogosphere. Yesterday, a fellow Utah blogger and I were discussing the shallow vitriol that is creeping into the Utah political blogosphere. If that’s where we’re going, we might as we’ll let the experts at Hannity and Combs yell at each other for us.
(Interestingly, this is a point raised in the comments to my last post: broader political participation is not beneficial, if people have no idea what they’re doing.)
Tongue firmly in cheek, Larry Lessig writes one of the more brutal reviews I’ve ever read, arguing that Keen is intentionally and subversively trying to prove (contrary to his stated thesis) that intermediaries are of limited worth, since Keen himself passed such a bad book by the intermediaries at Doubleday who decided to print it. Ouch.
I’m glad to see that Jeff Jarvis has agreed to debate Keen. As I argued a few weeks ago, Keen clearly intends to be incendiary, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t raise points that should be considered. We should be asking ourselves whether we’re using the Internet to do good things or just to do bad things “better.”
Along those lines, I am interesting to watch the tone of the Utah blogosphere. Yesterday, a fellow Utah blogger and I were discussing the shallow vitriol that is creeping into the Utah political blogosphere. If that’s where we’re going, we might as we’ll let the experts at Hannity and Combs yell at each other for us.
posted by steve u. at 6/07/2007
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4 Comments:
I find "The Cult of the Amateur" to be rather interesting after I have read other publications talking about the value that comes from amateurs (in any discipline) take the place of professionals to some degree. Another interesting thought on the subject was published by Douglas Adams in 1999:
"Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite." (full piece here)
We can't afford to just accept the experts without first making some judgment calls (individually) about how much we trust them.
Much of the objection to amateur generated content and discussion assumes that the amateur is too stupid/uninformed to have anything valuable to say. I'll buy that premise if the topic is rocket science or brain surgery but not when we're talking about public policy.
This blog, Politicopia, Senate Site and others are great examples of the ability of the internet to educate the unpolished amateur interested in what is going on and to provide an outlet for input from those with knowledge beyond what professional policy analysts and lawmakers might have. I have more confidence in my government because these tools exist and because they are being used in Utah.
An interesting post--I think I'll pick up the book (although, being one of the amateurs, I don't know that I'll agree with it...).
Your observation about vitriol among bloggers is also interesting. One problem with entirely electronic communication, e.g., a blog, is that it is inherently conducive to rudeness, or at least perceived rudeness, I think. To some extent, vitriol may be in the eye of the beholder. What I think of as a well-deserved barb may be construed as vitriol, particularly by its target. Although the format varies, bloggers strive to be provocative, unique, etc., which, like the news, may lead to emphasizing the negative, the political version of "If it bleeds, it leads." Tone often can be misunderstood when there is no body language to help gauge intent, and there is a tendency to be bolder (ruder?) when one engages in passionate dialog over the wire rather than face to face. Overall, I haven't found most people's tone too bad, and I read most left and right blogs, but maybe my standards are low...
VOU,
Most commentary is fairly good, but a few never add anything on the merits. I used to enjoy visiting left-leaning blogs and jumping in. A few months ago I tried that w some new sites, and they were very challenged that someone would join in to not agree w them. BTW, not saying echo chamber is unique to either side. I just hope I'm being open on this site.
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