This is my review of Andrew Keen’s book, the cult of the amateur, how today’s internet is killing our culture. It is a whining, outrageous and defensive fantasy based on sweeping generalizations, falsehoods, paranoia and a form of condescension so pissy that it blinds the author to anything resembling reality.

Let’s get something straight up front: our culture is most certainly evolving. Hell, it’s been the subject of this blog and my writing for the past five years. I say this, because Keen represents the (wonderful) world of pragmatism, which is the epitome of the modern culture. Hence, it’s understandable that he would view the internet as killing HIS world. That said, I think the subject needs an airing, and Keen is trying to give us that. The problem is that his prose is so filled with condescension and venom that it’s nothing more than emotional weeping. And if you took all of that out of the book, it would be about ten pages long.

I’m serious when I say the book is a tough read. It’s tough, because the mind’s search for substance is always confronted by extremism, emotion and haughty disdain for anybody who doesn’t meet his professional “standards” or think as he thinks. I can’t count the number of “Holy Craps” I uttered while working my way through the pages. And I think this is a big problem for a man who’s trying to ask some legitimate questions.

Here are just a few of my objections to Keen’s form of argument:

In the very beginning of the book, he says what it is, “It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.” He paints the problem as pragmatism versus the pejorative “digital utopians.” Whether he’s on YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia or another other place with a Web 2.0 tilt, he searches for the most outrageous examples to make his point.

Folks, if we’re going to have a discussion about this, we need to find some common ground on which to argue. I can show examples from each of those places that are the opposite of the riff-raff that Keen finds, so what’s the point of such extremism?

Ignorance. Egoism. Bad taste. Mob rule. In other words, these are things opposing voices wish to enable. How absurd. He’s fond of the old saw about monkeys and typewriters, often referring to those of the participatory age as such. Again, how do you argue with a man who’s calling you an ignorant, egotistic, boorish monkey? And more importantly, how does one with a reasonable mind listen to the arguments of one who uses such prose?

My biggest complaint with the book, however, is its black/white, win/lose, right/wrong, all-or-nothing perspective. In this he fails his argument and belies his own ignorance. His is the extreme view, not the views of those he labels utopians. I know many of the people he attacks in the book, and not one of them has ever expressed the cultural significance of the digital age from such an extremist stage.

Was Michael Powell being utopian when as FCC Chairman he stated that “application separation” was the single most important paradigm shift in the history of communications and that it would change things forever?

Jeff Jarvis has apparently agreed to debate Keen online, but it’s not a debate that’s winnable. Keen is so extreme, that his assumption of the middle is yanked far over to his end of the balance beam, so where is one to go to bring it back? He even throws in the sexual predator issue to support his fear mongering. What, I ask you, does that have to do with the personal media revolution? As if Keen’s love of rules and regulations has ever protected children from such.

“The cult of the amateur” is nothing more than a can of neatly stacked red herrings, and that doesn’t make for a debate at all.

A dear old friend of mine wrote this week expressing concerns similar to those stated in the book, so I want to try and discuss Keen’s central focus — that the personal media revolution will destroy Hollywood, the professional press and the advertising industry, thus collapsing our economy. To get my full take, you’d have to read everything that’s available in the archives of this website, especially the essays. I have no utopian views of the future, although I believe I have a little more faith in people than does Keen.

He believes the mainstream press and its methods for gathering and presenting the news is worth saving. This assumes that it’s dying, which it is not. It may seem like it from Keen’s perch, but just because something “could” happen doesn’t mean that it’s “going” to happen. Is the professional press worth saving? Of course, and who would argue otherwise? Its absolute grip on information, however, is not worth keeping, because today’s press is all about corporate greed and making money.

The public intuitively knows this, which is why Gallup’s annual measurement of trust in the institution of the press has been steadily sinking for decades. So the press is being reformed from without. What’s wrong with that?

Keen argues that his “cult of the amateur” is killing the copyright industry. Again, this assumes an all-or-nothing scenario, which I just don’t buy. What is under attack is Hollywood’s absolute grip on defining and nurturing the arts, because, again, it’s all about money. How is Hollywood, for example, about creativity, when the best it can do is produce sequel after sequel. Same with the publishing and music industries. The quickest path to profit is to repeat the blockbuster, but in so doing, it weakens all of the arts.

As to the economic argument, we all need to be momentarily concerned, because the copyright industry is America’s largest export. We entertain the world, which is why the industry maintains such favor on Capitol Hill. But again, this is purely a matter of big corporations who control all of entertainment in the name of profit. It has nothing to do with talent, creativity or Keen’s favorite, taste. Let me quote Powell again, “I have no problem if a venerable institution disappears tomorrow, as long as that value is distributed elsewhere in the economy.”

So it is about money, and it is about it being shifted away from institutional power to other places in the economy, namely the pockets of new power players. This may be a concern for professional institutions, but it is not a direct concern for our economy. Keen directly challenges Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” as economic mumbo-jumbo and cites examples of bloggers along the long tail that aren’t making any money. He then uses this to make the case that advertising will collapse absent a mass marketing paradigm and that the professional press will collapse, because nobody will pay the bills.

This is hogwash. Advertising, like media, is an institution undergoing change. The road may be rough, but it is not going to collapse. And there is tremendous money to be made in the information business, although perhaps not in the manner that Keen prefers.

He views the aggregation of content as theft and evil, and he routinely insults the integrity of young people, making sweeping statements about their eyeballs being drawn to what he views as nonsense instead of traditional forms of entertainment.

I have always been concerned that forms of entertainment are our biggest export, but this is a question that’s bigger than Keen’s use of it. We really have to decide as a nation if this is truly in our best interests.

Let’s go back to the last big cultural change, the time when modernism first came on the scene. Those of the ruling elite at the time shouted similar themes, essentially that the worship of rationalism and the human mind would replace the worship of God (through the Roman church). However, modernism didn’t destroy faith; it simply helped us evolve as human beings and move our faith from that which is blind to that which is understandable. In the same way, postmodernism questions the ruling elite of today and demands that we rethink assumptions. It will no more “kill” modernist views of the press than modernism killed premodernist views of religion.

So it’s not an all-or-nothing thing, and we shouldn’t approach it with a spirit of fear.

Keen is obsessed with the idea of truth, and that the road to truth is through science and study. Professional experts, in his view, come closer to truth than those who haven’t followed that which has come before, and this explains his indignation toward anyone who might claim gifts or inherent skill or talent. This is textbook modernism.

The postmodernist, however, looks around and sees institutional failure, which is the price of living in the culture that Keen wants to save. The postmodernist sees the American dream as reserved for the few or the fortunate, because the modernist culture protects its haves. Follow the numbers. With every year that goes by, the gap between the haves and the have-nots increases. Wealth is in the hands of the relative fewer, and pomos ask if this isn’t really a failure.

Technology that was created to serve the institutions now is in the hands of everyone, so yes, depending on your perspective, there is very much a cultural war underway. Media is only the most visible aspect, but every institution is threatened.

Since I first began writing about this, a quote by Leonard Sweet (hardly a digital utopian) has graced the top of my pages: “Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: reinvent yourself for the 21st century or die! Some would rather die than change.”

Andrew Keen would rather die than change.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 10:10 am and is filed under Postmodernism, Media 2.0, Disruptions, Citizens Media, Copyright. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.