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.