I’ve had a few days to calm down after reading Newsweek’s “Web Exclusive” this week — Revenge of the Experts — so I think it’s safe to comment now. Newsweek has done what many of us feared, they’ve picked up Andrew Keen’s meme about the “cult of the amateur” and manufactured a new lede without taking into consideration the fallacy of the meme in the first place. This is how falsehood gets spread throughout the culture, which is exactly what Keen — and apparently now Newsweek — believe is the problem with “amateurs.” For all of Keen’s rantings about truth, there is little to be found in the Newsweek argument.
Let’s begin with the assumption in the title, that there is a battle underway in our culture between experts and amateurs. Says who? The so-called experts, that’s who, because they feel their protected turf is being threatened. It is, but not by any amateur movement or cult. Institutional arrogance is their biggest threat. They need to look in the mirror.
Let me repeat; there is no movement by amateurs to take anything away from professionals, and this is especially true in media. The extent to which everyday people look to non-traditional sources of information today is not an indication that they are being lured away from “truth” by roaming mobs of ignorant automatons. That defection is more illustrative of the failure of traditional, institutional media than anything else, along with the arrogance-gone-to-seed of anyone claiming exclusive access to “truth.” In the words of the immortal Frank Barone, “Holy crap!”
“The individual user has been king on the Internet,” the article says, “but the pendulum seems to be swinging back toward edited information vetted by professionals.” What? Wait, there’s more:
In short, the expert is back. The revival comes amid mounting demand for a more reliable, bankable Web. “People are beginning to recognize that the world is too dangerous a place for faulty information,” says Charlotte Beal, a consumer strategist for the Minneapolis-based research firm Iconoculture. Beal adds that choice fatigue and fear of bad advice are creating a “perfect storm of demand for expert information.”
Again, this assumes facts not in evidence, such as we’re coming out of a season when people were quite happy with crap. This is hogwash. Only to the modernist, pragmatist mind is there any sudden lust for truth. Hell, it’s been there all along.
The story points to start-up Mahalo with it’s “people-powered search” as evidence of the “shift” and then goes on to quote its founder, Jason Calacanis as an expert. To add weight to Mahalo, the writer lumps it in with other efforts supported by its major investor, Sequoia Capital — names like YouTube, Yahoo and Google — as if that qualifies the expertise of Calacanis. This is textbook modernism at work, expertise by association. It’s also crap because, while fielding an impressive list of winners, Sequoia has also had its share losers. Remember eToys?
Calacanis’s comments are combined with those of Keen, who joyfully breathes his poison into the story.
It’s also easier to woo advertisers with the promise of controlled content than with hit-and-miss blog blather. “Nobody wants to advertise next to crap,” says Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur,” a jeremiad against the ills of the unregulated Web.
A jeremiad? Ills of the unregulated Web? What ills? Boy, there’s nothing the pragmatist mind enjoys more than rules and regulations, because they’re always made by the haves to sustain what they, well, have.
The article at least gives the final word to Glenn Reynolds, whose book An Army of Davids contains the phrase, “the triumph of personal technology over mass technology.” I’ve read that book, too, and I can tell you it doesn’t even remotely suggest the cult-like attack on truth that Keen is taking to the bank.
The Newsweek article actually has the gall to make the statement that we’re in a new period of “podium worship,” a validation of expertise that somehow had been stripped away by the chaos of personal media. But hidden in the story is its real purpose — to send a message to Madison Avenue that things will be okay and that vetted content will be there for them and their money. For all the popularity of the pejorative “user-generated content,” nobody’s been able to make a lot of money with it, and Calacanis, et al, want to assure us all that their content will be equally attractive to users but also safe for ads.
That, of course, remains to be seen. Advertisers don’t just want a sterile environment; they also want eyeballs, and that’s the real conundrum for the pragmatist’s view of new media. In this way of thinking, there is only one reason to make “content” and that is to make money. Why else do it? Indeed.
The Telcos want the government to think of the Web as just another medium, so that they can police the thing for everybody and sell access to the highest bidders. Keen and Newsweek likewise want everything to just return to the way it was. Sorry, but that horse left the barn years ago. And while Newsweek uses the term “revival” to describe what they hope to see happening, I think “nostalgia” is a more accurate term.
And the saddest thing of all about articles like these is that they are added to record. People hoping for relief from the disruption of personal technology will point to them as evidence of hope, when in reality, they’re pure folly, bathed in assumptions that aren’t real.
And again, isn’t that exactly what “experts” are supposed to prevent?
UPDATE: Howard Owens brilliantly deconstructs the entire Newsweek piece.
In a pretty significant announcement this morning, Google is broadening the scope of open applications that developers can use to interact with YouTube and its player. The end game, according to TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, is the original concept of Google Video — to host all of the video on the Web.