Keen is wrong, Keen is right

As an assignment for a research lecture i’m following (in English), i’ve written a critical review of two chapters dealing with journalism and blogging in Andrew Keens book “The Cult of the Amateur.”

For everybody interested in blogging, citizen journalism, the demise of culture general at the cruel hands of the libertarian internet, and much more, this could be an interesting read.

The fact that Keen dislikes blogs and I run a blog on this website, seems enough reason to explore his arguments.

For those of you unfamiliar with Keens critique of the internet, here’s an appetizer:

Andrew Keen: Web 2.0 Is Fucked (The Next Web 2009) from Robin Wauters on Vimeo.

You can read more here or find Keens original argument here. In the following I’m not responding to the video above, but to the book Keen wrote in 2007, and I’m focussing mainly on journalism and blogging.

On one level, Andrew Keen is fundamentally mistaken in his arguments against user generated content and its supposedly detrimental effects on professional journalism. On another, his critique is relevant and needs to be addressed by bloggers, journalists and reseachers alike.

Keens case against the internet reads as a classic, if not misinformed, work of reaction. He argues that the ‘democratization’ many celebrate the internet for is actually undermining anything high-quality. The “over-abundance of authors” may lead to a future, fears Keen, where “everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience.”

Instead, we ought to trust (and buy the products of) mainstream media, for their institutional structure and gatekeeping role allows them to discern what’s important from what’s not.

Blogs especially are bad, because they “confuse popular opinion.” Keen, a university-educated Brit with entreprenuerial experience in Sillicon Valley, works from the assumption that there is one single ‘popular opinion’, which I doubt.

More importantly, I agree Keen is looking for the wrong things on the internet, and therefore, many of his arguments miss their point completely. Bloggers don’t set out to be The New York Times, and their readers know it.

Keens argument is apples and oranges, big time.

“The internet is just people speaking.”

Jeff Jarvis, critizing Keens original argument as stated in The Weekly Standard

KEEN IS WRONG

Keen is wrong on a number of issues, some of which i will shortly address here. Those of you that are familiar with the book might be more interested in the next section.

Keen refuses to see anything wrong with today’s institutional media. Mainstream media too spread gossip, sensationalize serious politics, and corrupt serious debate, all things Keen exclusively lays on bloggers. I’m not saying all media do, but that they can. Here’s an extreme example.

Experts, the bees knees according to Keen, can fail too, and they do.

In Keens world, there is only one sort of knowledge. It’s what academics, journalists and other gatekeepers deem good enough for the masses to consume. But as Dan Gilmor has aptly argued, people without a degree in politics can be very knowledgeable, too. And that’s understating it.

He conceives of the news as a monolith, but anyone who has read two different news papers on the same day knows this conception to be false.

Keens idea of the boundary of professional journalism and bloggers is vague. Formal journalistic training seems the one vital criteria for discerning between experts and amateurs, but many journalists have never had any training except for on the job.

“Andrew, the mud you throw obscures the issues you raise.”

David Weinberger, debating Keen in The Wall Street Journal

While Keen, in my eyes, has shown profound concern for all of our shared future, his rhetoric is elitist, something he has been frequently criticized for. Keen likes to compare bloggers to monkeys, using the infinite monkey theorem. As David Weinberger points out, this rhetoric is hardly helpful and obscures some of the more valid arguments in The Cult of the Amateur.

FLIMSY METHOD

Keen has been criticized for cherry-picking facts – he sees only bad blogs and comes up with particularly twisted assertions. He implies, for instance, that social networking sites are to blame for “an infestation of anonymous sexual predators and pedophiles.”

But apart from these assertions, his book is said to contain factual errors.

Keens examples miss their mark completely. Defending a remark about Wikipedia, Keen has said: “This assertion is based on conversations I’ve had with many teachers as well as my own experience as a college professor.”

Now, that, is lousy evidence. But I believe it’s examplarary of Keens method. In another instance, Keen sought to prove that the blogosphere is stupid by comparing a list of the most popular blogs to a the New York Times best-seller list.

I agree that Keen is inconsistent. At one point he claims that blogs are corrupting debate. But on the same page (54) he states that blogs just talk about trivial stuff. This to me seems blatantly contradictory.

KEEN IS RIGHT

But that’s not the whole story.

Keen is right to warn for the problems of blogging and the internet. I believe there is a very real risk of constant confirmation. On the net we can find mirrors of ourselves, says Keen: “[A]ll we read are our own thoughts.” Google, according to Keen, just tells us what we already know.

The implication of a fragmented world in which only identical views exist cannot be overstated. But we shouldn’t forget that people have always sought ways to communicate mainly with yeasayers. We can all debate without listening. Habermas’ public sphere, which Keen seems to idealize, has never been a practical reality.

(Also, my lecturer says emperical evidence does not support this mirror-seeking-behaviour. People on the net also surf to sites that don’t fit their exact political profile. Reference for this claim will follow.)

Amateur journalism corrupts serious debate, claims Keen. This may be true in some cases, but on the other hand: big media have shown not to be the ideal place for serious debate, either, especially since they are so dependent on advertising. It seems out of place to blame joeshmoe.blogspot.com for the very real demise of institutional media outlets.

There is a possibility of a new sort of control, of Gatekeeper 2.0, of centralized access (through search engines like Google) to few voices. And there may be too much (trivial) information. However, looking back is not a solution. It’s finding new ways to access (and assess) knowledge – building new taxonomies –that we should explore.

Being a blogger, Keens critique hits a nerve. He may be right that emphasizing amateurism doesn’t make it go away. But as Lessig has pointed out, an amateur is someone who does something “for the love of what he does.”

I believe that for the purpose ‘normal’ bloggers have, this is enough, and by dismissing empassioned individual bloggers as monkeys collectively destroying nearly-extinct ‘high culture’, Keen is misrepresenting reality profoundly. For a writer who claims to serve some higher purpose, this is a very mundane error indeed. Talk about talent!