Yes And No

A discussion of a new book by Andrew Keen appears in today's Sunday Times. The subject of Keen's book is the dumbing down of the world as a result of the "Cult of the Amateur" he sees as permeating the internet in general and blogs in particular.  

Before the internet it seemed like a joke: if you provide an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters one of them will eventually come up with a masterpiece. But with the web now firmly established in its second evolutionary phase – in which users create the content on blogs, podcasts and streamed video – the infinite monkey theory doesn’t seem so funny any more.

“Today’s technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters,” argues Andrew Keen, who believes that “web 2.0” is killing our culture, assaulting our economy and destroying time-honoured codes of conduct.

An Englishman who moved from north London to California in the 1990s and swapped university lecturing for internet entrepreneur-ship, Keen has turned against the thoughtless barbarism of his Silicon Valley peers. In an alarming new book The Cult of the Amateur he argues that many of the ideas promoted by champions of web 2.0 are gravely flawed. Instead of creating masterpieces, the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.

Worse still, the supposed “democratisation” of the web has been a sham. “Despite its lofty idealisation it’s undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent,” he says. Take the much vaunted “wisdom of crowds”, which has led to the astonishing growth of the free online reference work Wikipedia. The English site alone boasts 1.8m articles freely contributed by ordinary web users and more are created every minute.

But as the sum of what we all know and agree, the wisdom of crowds has no greater value than Trivial Pursuit. Wikipedia is full of mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings. What happens if you try to do something about it? William Connolley, a climate modeller at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge and an expert on global warming, disagreed with a Wikipedia editor over a particular entry on the site. After trying to correct inaccuracies Connolley was accused of trying to remove “any point of view which does not match his own”. Eventually he was limited to making just one edit a day.

From one of the apparently much-despised blogging set that Mr. Keen abhors all I can say is that Keen is both right and wrong in his analysis. He laments the rise of the amateur over the "expert" who has contacts and an established track record on whatever subject. I tend to agree with him that any Wikipedia entry needs to be taken with a grain of salt. (Yes, I cite Wikipedia, but note what I call from there is not usually technical in nature.) Yes, the abuse by some of the "democratization of knowledge" folks is pretty bad (they'll shout you down in a heartbeat, regardless of the facts). But there actually is a certain amount of wisdom in the crowd about a lot of subjects. Not all, by any means, but some.

Where he is glaringly wrong here is his contention that the media set has some special, irreplaceable fount of knowledge that trumps everyone else. Most reporters are no exactly what you would consider experts in whatever they report on.

At a working breakfast in 2004 Keen was alarmed to be told the new democratic internet would overthrow the “dictatorship of expertise”. And that’s happening already. Wikipedia, with its millions of amateur editors and unreliable content, is the 17th most trafficked site on the net. Britannica.com, a subscription-based service with 100 Nobel prize-winning contributors and more than 4,000 other experts is ranked 5,128. As a result, Britannica has had to make painful cuts in staffing and editorial.

These cutbacks don’t only affect the individuals laid off. They affect us all – because if Britannica and publications like it should disappear we’ll be obliged to rely on the unreliable patchwork of information parcelled out on Wikipedia by people who often don’t even reveal their identity.

“Instead of a dictatorship of experts, we’ll have a dictatorship of idiots,” says Keen, who finds classic signs of totalitarianism in Silicon Valley. “Anyone who disagrees is wrong. These people manifest some of the symptoms of 19th century Russian idealists and utopians, who think that their vision of the world is going to change everything for the better.”

I take it Keen isn't real interested in selling his book since he is insulting the online community so badly.