“Cult of The Amateur”–Early Reflections on Keen’s Work

What this episode covers

I am reading Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values . It is a very interesting, and challenging book. His general thesis is that our move into the world of the “Digital Natives” (see my other blog post on that) has been essentially dumbing down our discourse. Perhaps even more to the point, he puts forward three points that catch my interest: First, “I” matter the most. In this new world we are all equally important, and apparently all have an equal right to be heard. Unfortunately, in our rush to be heard we forget that we should also listen. We are rushing to be heard, and ultimately result in simply asserting our right to speak.  In discussing an event he attended, he writes “Everyone was simultaneously broadcasting themselves, but nobody was listening. Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering.” He then goes on to write “The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves. “ So what? What’s wrong with everyone writing about themselves?   His point is a bit more than simply we are producing too much noise. When we do take time to read, and to listen, we are no longer availing ourselves of the filters of expertise. We are starting to read and value uninformed, and ignorant, analysis over the informed and educated. When we no longer look to experts for opinions on lofty and heady subjects we lose the ability to truly learn, and instead replace that with a sense of knowing and not a reality of knowing. Second, from this drift away from the works of experts to amateurs, he argues that facts and truth are no longer immutable. Again, he writes: As Marshall Poe observed in the September 2006 issue of the Atlantic: We tend to think of truth as something that resides in the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is written in the stars…. But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean…. The community decides that two plus two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability. What’s even more dangerous here than just the self-absorbed cacophony is that this new cult of the amateur actually elevates opinion to the same level as educated fact. Once we believe a few hours of exposure to a topic makes us “as good as” an expert, we substitute our knowledge for real knowledge. I was listening to an ETS Talk podcast from Cole Camplese and his group at Penn State University — University Park. They were attending a conference and Cole was mentioning the great work done by Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State University. In the discussion Cole talks about the change from the focus on the Professor, with 200+ hours of advanced coursework, to the “wisdom of the crowd.” When they added up the experiences of the professor,

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