What’s Next?

Andrew Keen was on NewsNight last night promoting his new book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy’. His basic premise is that the Internet has allowed too many amateurs into the game and the traditional ‘cultural gatekeepers’ - reporters, editors and the film industry have fallen by the way-side.

This is so elitist it’s frightening. It works on the assumption that the old means of deciding whose views deserved to be heard was better. That people who aren’t in the select few should just stay out of the whole thing and leave the important job of thinking to the professionals.

“[They] can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels”.

People who use the internet will see past Keen’s point immediately. Yes, there is an awful lot of twaddle on the Internet, but there is an awful lot of gold that you don’t need to look too hard to find. There is plenty of excellent music on the internet, some excellent novels, well-produced videos and many many well-written blogs. There are plenty of experts on the internet, the difference is that no-one chooses who they are except the viewers. ‘Uninformed political commentary’? How about the personal blogs of politicians? The voice of our elected officials untampered by commentators? Isn’t the average citizen better informed now that there’s Wikipedia available (which contrary to what Keen might think, has surprisingly efficient quality control) at the click of a mouse rather than having to shell out for Britannica ? How can this be a bad thing?

The Internet is not just a new medium, it’s a far better medium because it’s active rather than passive. The great advantage of the Internet is the so-called ‘infinite canvas’, bloggers aren’t limited by column length to make their point. Take whenever a documentary like ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ emerges, a newspaper can run something giving the highlights of why it’s crap, but a blog can go point for point, saying exactly what’s wrong, and if it’s wrong, there will be another blog explaining why. The blogosphere has proved a far better medium for checking the mainstream media than it ever was itself.

If that’s not good enough, how about the Internet allowing collaboration on a far larger scale? The success of online collaboration has allowed the open-source operating system Linux to (nearly) match the power of windows, and can be used for free. In turn, this makes it possible for the OLPC to design a laptop that costs $100 to give the power of the technology to the world’s poor. The ability for charities and pressure groups to organise on a far larger scale than ever before. Keen might moan the ‘democratisation’ of the media, but you get the feeling he’d probably have been one of those bemoaning the extension of the franchise. After all, if the masses don’t have anything interesting to say, who wants them deciding who’s in charge?

The end of cultural gatekeepers? It’s about time. The time when a few decided what our culture means is over. The internet far from destroying our culture has become our culture. It tells people that they can aspire to be more than intellectual consumers and can have their own voice. I for one can’t see that as anything other than one of the most important steps our culture has taken in a long time.

Simon Walter’s of the Daily Mail launched a scathing attack at blogger Owen Barder (whose site seems to be down as a result). Reflecting the best journalistic traditions of the Daily Mail, it’s full of mis-direction, half-truths and things that just flat out aren’t true. Tim Worstall did an excellent deconstruction of it. Here are the highlights:

A former aide to Tony Blair has posted on his website an attack on the Prime Minister which compares President George Bush to Hitler.

The attack, which has shocked Whitehall, appears on the outspoken, sexually explicit, website blog of £100,000-a-year civil servant Owen Barder.

I very much doubt the attack ’shocked Whitehall’ as it wasn’t even his comment, he’d just linked to a Guardian article. Which, while doubtless suspicious behaviour, isn’t in itself a crime. And ’sexually explicit’? Please, the only thing that comes was his rather frank accont of his vasectomy which Walters is infering is one of the least explicit things he’s written about. It’s just a cheap ploy to gain some shock value in his opening lines.

He’s also guilty of crimes like condemning the abduction of terrorist suspects to be tortured in parts unknown.

Mr Barder condemns ‘extraordinary renditions’ whereby America - allegedly using UK airports with Mr Blair’s support - snatched Al Qaeda suspects and tortured them.

Which wasn’t an entirely treasonous opinion last time I checked…and he’s quite right to do so.

Margaret Thatcher is described as ‘pernicious,’ while ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock is praised for making ‘one of the finest speeches in British politics’.

It turns out ‘pernicious’ was a comment someone else had left on a post. Journalistic integrity of the highest source here.

And the real killer? All of this was written during an unpaid two year sabbatical, so he wasn’t even a member of the Civil Service at the time! Making the entire point of the article well, pointless.

The comments section on the article was closed rather quickly. It’d be more honest of the Mail to remove it all together if they don’t allow comments that seriously question the article (as many other newspaper comments sections are happy to publish). But maybe honesty in procedure would be asking a bit much of a newspaper that would print this garbage.