CJR: Too Much Power to the People?

The Kicker

Too Much Power to the People?

By Gal Beckerman Fri 29 Jun 2007 10:33 AM

The infamously brutal New York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani, today reviews a new book by Andrew Keen. It’s called “The Cult of the Amateur,” and basically, from what I can tell from the review, it’s an extended rant about the dangers of over-democratization as manifested in a Web gone wild with free, user-generated content by the inferior minds of the hoi polloi.

Here’s what seems to be the gist of it, in Keen’s words: “What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune. The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”

In her review, Kakutani actually reserves judgment on this provocative stance – not a typical move from her – but, to my eyes at least, Keen hangs himself with his own words. Not having read the book, I have not heard everything he has to say, but the quotes in the review seem to capture the flavor and it comes down to this: Keen is scared of America.

As with many of the elitist arguments against the Internet, Keen’s shows a fundamental lake of faith in our culture and our brand of capitalism, which has always been able, in the long run, to sift through the garbage of the unoriginal and crude in order to reward (culturally and financially) that which has real value. Granted Web 2.0 has created much more junk to sift through. No doubt. But that’s no reason to assume we won’t be able to create new ways of letting the cream rise to the top. If that means retooling the industries of publishing, music and news-gathering – and finding a way for them to make money again – what’s so wrong with that? Is there anything more American?

CJR

Comments

Blake Stacey

Fri 29 Jun 2007 12:10 PM

I noticed this book in the local Barnes-and-Borders-a-Million the other day and wondered if it had anything useful to say; now I suspect it's not worth the time to bother about. Some additional points could be made to amend this post's sentiment:

1. A good many of those content sources deserve to be destroyed, or at the very least harshly criticized. Didn't anybody pay attention to that transparency survey which U. Maryland conducted on news agencies (and which was described on this website)? And what about the pitiful state of science journalism? To steal a motto from the science-fiction writer David Brin, "CITOKATE: criticism is the only known antidote to error."

2. Bloggers do, from time to time, produce original content, even beyond the originality which is inherent in assembling sources.

padikiller

Sun 1 Jul 2007 08:29 AM

Gal Beckerman wrote

As with many of the elitist arguments against the Internet, Keen’s shows a fundamental lake [sic] of faith in our culture and our brand of capitalism...

padikiller wonders

Does Mr. Beckerman expand this reasoning to include the capitalistic talk radio business?....

Is he here to call Diane Feinstein to task for her lack of faith in our culture and our brand of capitalism by forcing radio stations to air unprofitable liberal viewpoints?...

Mr. Beckerman rehashes his faith in multibillion dollar corporations to do the right thing... And now he thinks that the public has the ability to control these monster corporations....

As for Web 2.0....

EVERYBODY should be wary of inferring any type of "democratic" or "populist" motivation in the oligarchy of companies that control it...

These corporations are driven by profits and they routinely cowtow to fascist agendas in order to score a buck..

Try searching Google Images for "Tiananmen Square" on both the American site and the Chinese site... You will find that the results from the Chinese site have bee scrubbed of any images of the Tiananmen Square Massacre...

MySpace, YouTube and the other up-and-coming Web 2.0 portals have highly restrictive terms of service and routinely censor content for being politically or religiously "offensive"...

It's not a matter of "faith" in the "people" as Mr. Beckerman mistakenly concludes.... It's a matter of distrusting the CEO's and boards of multi-billion dollar corporations.... It's a matter of finding it difficult to believe that these corporations will act in the best interest of society when doing so could lose them a nickel....

The reason we have corporate regulation... The Fair Labor Act... The SEC... The Anti-Trust Act... The FTC..... Etc.. etc... etc... Is that corporations simply cannot be controlled by customers... They collude... They price fix... They lie... They cheat... They steal.... And they do so the MOST in an unregulated free market....

It's time for Mr. Beckerman to click his heels together and head for Kansas... His love affair with YouTube is misguided, and as a self-proclaimed "watchdog" he should be the FIRST one to be wary of these companies....

I don't advocate government regualtion of Web 2.0 portals any more than I advocate regualtion of talk radio... But I distrust both of these outlets... Mr. Beckerman should too...

hmc

Tue 3 Jul 2007 08:31 AM

As a matter of principle, I would not comment on a book I had not read. I can't help think that your doing so is another example of the degeneration of standards implicit in the way the web works.

As far as the populist nature of the web goes, so far it seems to be even more full of corporate right-wing hate-speech & propoganda than the old media, and journalism of integrity & intelligence is even easier to ignore, for most people.

Pinko Punko

Thu 5 Jul 2007 05:36 PM

It seems Keen is keen to denounce Whiggery in all forms!

Post a comment

We ask our readers to express opinions in a manner respectful to the readers and writers of CJR. Criticism of ideas is strongly encouraged, but personal, ad hominem attack will result in deletion of posted comments and, after one repeat violation, banning of the individual user. CJR reserves the right to edit or delete, for reasons of content, comments submitted to CJR. We also ask users to please keep posts to the topic at hand; those wandering far afield or appearing to be spam may be deleted. Please read the complete comment policy and full legal disclaimer.

Name: Email Address:

URL: Remember personal info?

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)