The internet often goes through bouts of soul searching, but a full-blown counter-reformation could be on the way. If so, then Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur (Nicholas Brealey Publishing), could be the Martin Luther of the movement. He believes the so-called web 2.0 revolution of interactivity and user-generated content is leading to “less culture, less reliable news and a chaos of useless information”. You don’t have to swallow all he says to accept there is a case to be answered.
He is at his weakest swallowing the music industry’s equating of tracks illegally downloaded with lost sales revenues; even if many are not listened to and would never have been bought because the teenagers involved haven’t got the money.
This doesn’t justify it, but it makes claims of losses of $20-billion — one and a half times revenue in 2005 — simply ludicrous. The music industry’s problem is that instead of adapting to a new technology, it has tried to halt it by controlling distribution through digital rights management. There will always be pirating of music, but as iTunes has proved, most people will pay for downloads as long as a fair payments system is in place. But the industry still hasn’t woken up. Last week it was in uproar because the singer Prince decided to give away his new CD. Isn’t that his human right?
The author is more convincing about the difficulty of distinguishing between good and bad information on the web, but part of the problem arises from expecting higher standards for the web than exist in the tabloid world of real life. Sure, Wikipedia has become an unreliable source for controversial facts (as real life is), but it is still a goldmine for the vast mass of uncontroversial facts. It may not be as good as the Encyclopedia Britannica, but not everyone has it at home — and experts who are now less accessible in Britannica can often be read elsewhere on the web. For all its faults, the web has increased the availability of knowledge hugely in our favour and if, as Keen says, we are too ready to “cut and paste” information thinking it is our own — hardly a new problem — then it ought to be tackled at school.
His central thesis — that “the knowledge of the expert, in fact, does trump the collective wisdom of amateurs” — is self-evidently true of specialist areas but is not the case universally. In the field of music there is no reason why peer review — by potential consumers exchanging views about downloads — should not be more effective than the decisions of corporate talent scouts who often miss trends amid the mass of offerings. At one level, the video site YouTube is an untameable jungle of naive postings and disguised corporate promos. At another it is an unprecedented well of creativity from which tomorrow’s film directors may emerge just as they have in the past from making advertisements for television. If YouTube can’t cope with corporate intrusions then users will move elsewhere, as they are now from MySpaceMySpace to Facebook.
One area where his criticism rings true is media. He paints a nightmare scenario of newspapers and others laying off experts in the face of competition from “citizen journalists” and bloggers whose main material, without which they would not exist, is recycled news from old media which they acquire at no cost. Hardly any of them originate news themselves, except at the local level, yet they could be killing the golden goose that feeds them. The author generously exempts Guardian Unlimited from the dumbing down of news, but he could be proved right that the filtering system that traditional media has (news editors, sub editors, revise subs, lawyers etc) will not easily be replaced if dismantled. This scenario makes it all the more disgraceful that a Labour government is cutting the licence fee for the BBC, one of the very few highly trusted brands in the world. We don’t have to accelerate the decline. – Guardian Unlimited Â