Andrew Keen @ Super Conference
OLA‘s Super Conference wrapped up yesterday — it was good. I’d say it was great but, truth is, I only made it to one session (other than my own). I had many more circled in the program, but a combination of last-minute preparations for 2 panels I was on, a snow storm, and an impending cold kept me away.
The one session I did attend was Andrew Keen’s, author of this book, which I assume you’ve heard of. I also assume you’ve heard/read the general reaction to Keen’s thesis (his book is subtitled “How today’s Internet is killing our culture”, which probably gives you a good sense of that thesis). If you know me, you know where I stand on “today’s Internet”, so you also have a sense of the biases I brought to the session (even though, I admit, I haven’t read his book yet). And while I fully expected Keen to be entertaining (you can’t be a rabble-rouser and not be entertaining, can you?), I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed the session and how many of his arguments I couldn’t disagree with. Here are the notes I took, followed by some reactions. I’ve linked to a few Wikipedia articles in the notes below, mostly for the sheer irony of it.
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Session 600: The Democratization of Web 2.0 and Digital Narcissism, Andrew Keen
Keen began by saying how he was happy to be talking to real people with real jobs defending real books and real researchers. He relied heavily on local libraries while in university, riding his bike around to multiple branches in London, signing books out from all of them (once he had 90 out at the same time!). He says that his book has raised the ire of “digital communities” and that he’s spoken to a number of very hostile audiences. He gave a speech at the ICA in London and it was a librarian that defended him, so he’s pleased to be here, talking to a whole lot of us.
According to Keen, librarians (like teachers, journalists, and other media folk) are on the front line of the “battle”. His book was influenced by Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, where Postman argues that the future is either Orwellian or Huxleyan, but it can’t be both. Keen admits that he wrote his book believing it was both (1984 + Brave New World = The Internet).
He gave us a lot of background info at the beginning of the session, mostly to (I assume) establish the fact that he’s not opposed to new media, that he likes the Internet and uses it everyday, and that he’s definitely not a Luddite. Some of this background included:
- He worked for a music start up magazine whose goal was to find the highest quality music journalists and put out that content in a high quality magazine (“typical media”)
- In traditional media you find talent, polish it, market it, sell it.
- He’s always loved media as a reader, consumer, writer, broadcaster.
- When he got online, he realized it was interesting and that it had potential.
- He’s always loved technology: he has a blackberry, he loves the web, and he recognizes that it is a great platform for distributing content and knowledge, while keeping costs down. He drank the Kool Aid early!
- He founded audiocafe.com, which put together high quality music content, good journalism, and all sorts of information related to music.
- audiocafe.com was killed when Amazon got into music.
- Considers Amazon to be a “Web 1.0″ company – the reviews are quite good (except the reviews of his book! — his words)
- He thinks it’s a great tragedy that newspapers and books will be replaced by something digital, because digital is cheaper and easier, and that’s fine (he mentioned that the Kindle, or something like it, will be the future of the business).
- He considers himself a “believer” and a “digital revolutionary”.
So, how did he become “the antichrist of Silicon valley” (that’s actually on his business card, see image above)? How did he come to see the internet as something that has come to undermine culture? Well, the first thing he admitted was that the subtitle of his book was his publisher’s idea — it’s inflammatory, it sells books. He believes that the biggest weakness in his book is that he treats the internet as a person. The internet isn’t killing anything — it’s not a person, it’s just a platform. Technology doesn’t kill without people, so it’s us: we are killing our culture through our misuse of the platform.
The cult of the amateur is about the people who don’t come into our libraries and bookstores and only hang out in front of their computers. The book is not about technology, it’s about the impact of technology. According to Keen, something profound is going on and that is a cultural challenge to authority. It’s not something that has happened in the last 5-10 years, it’s been happening for 50 years. What is going on today is simply the next chapter in Postman’s analysis: the problem with late capitalist culture is the breakdown of community and authority. We are seeing a more personalized culture, it’s Durkheim 2.0 on steroids! The increase in personalization is seeing the individual as being increasingly empowered as a citizen and a consumer, and in today’s economy, citizenship has dissolved into consumerism.
Keen believes that the traditional boundaries and structures of society and authority have gone away and it’s the “digital Utopians” who are vilifying him. For Keen, the Internet is simply 1968 2.0. He mentioned a book by Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyberspace. What Turner knew was that the internet grew out of hippie culture (not a coincidence that it started in California) and “web 2.0″ is just a further development of that culture — blog technology was invented by a hippie, web 2.0 is a cultural rebellion against authority, only it’s not happening on the college campuses of Berkeley, it’s happening virtually.
Keen notes that the seeds of web 2.0 were in web 1.0, but the technology just wasn’t there yet. The technology was invented to “empower” people to author themselves on the internet. Google is the great web 2.0 company and they invented a revolutionary business model: they figured out that they could create content for nothing. They could create software that encouraged all of us to enter our “collective intelligence” into their search engine and collect that intelligence – but is the sum aggregation of that intelligence worth anything? No one has been paid by Google for that. In traditional media, you paid for that content. What Google figured out is that you don’t have to pay people to build a valuable, next generation web 2.0 company.
For Keen, this is not necessarily a bad thing. However, what is bad is that we are doing away with expertise. Google has disinter-mediated that wisdom. Experts (librarians included) have been knocked out of the equation. The nature of web 2.0 is such that we are being seduced into creating content for this revolution – into creating content for Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. (the original subtitle of his book was “The Great Seduction”). How does this tie into his cultural critique? Individuals are being “empowered” (but, arguably, not really empowered). It’s all part of the hippie, individualist revolution.
Keen noted that Tim O’Reilly was the intellectual founder of web 2.0. In 2004, Keen attended “FOO Camp” (“Friends of O’Reilly), where some of the richest and smartest in silicon valley got together. It was an “unconference” which was a microcosm of the world these people were trying to create. No one was up on a raised dais, everybody just showed up and chose what they were going to talk about. It was highly democratized, anarchy in practice. It was Wikipedia!
It was at FOO Camp that Keen had his epiphany that mainstream media is being undermined and that our traditional cultural businesses are being threatened. The new internet has created a culture where mainstream media and the authority of experts is being undermined. People are losing their jobs because of it — librarians, editors, recorders, etc. — because people are not paying for culture, they are making it themselves (or so they think).
The other problem? It’s garbage! There is quality content out there but the good stuff is so hard to find because it’s being crowded out by all the noise. Wikipedia is the perfect example: it’s not wrong, it’s not that it’s inaccurate (although a lot of the time, it is), it’s just that it’s chaotic. No one is in charge, the kids are running the show. The Wikipedia entry on “truthiness” (which is a smart, funny Colbert joke) is almost as long as the entry on “truth“. That’s just wrong. And it’s highly Dystopian.
In conclusion, Keen said that he wrote his book in a highly Dystopian frame of mind, trying to mash up Orwell and Huxley. He says that his book is a warning and that the reality isn’t really that bad. He predicts that 2008 will be the year of the professional — experts will be cool again! It’s not a problem with the internet or technology, it’s that you have to have a social contract to organize a society. His closing anecdote was about Jason Calacanis (founder of weblogs inc.). Calacanis called Keen after an interview Keen did with NPR. He told him about his new company, Mahalo, a human-powered search engine that employs experts. Keen said that Calacanis does not believe that this new media works — that it lends itself to corruption and anarchy.
According to Keen, the future is in valuing experts, it’s in curation, it’s reminding us that technology is good but only in the hands of experts and those who know what they are talking about. The future is one in which web 1.0 and 2.0 come together. His final words? Don’t believe the radical digital Utopians but don’t believe the Luddites either. We shape the technology and when it’s deployed by the right people, it’s hugely valuable. When it isn’t, it’s hugely destructive.
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And, that’s all of it. I’m not going to pull the thing apart, word-for-word (I’ll save that for the book), but I will say that I really appreciated his admission at the end that the book is a cautionary tale rather than an earnest treatise on What’s Wrong With The Internet Today (at least, that’s how I took his final admission). As I mentioned earlier, I did find myself nodding in agreement a few times during his session: the bits about there being too much noise on the web rang true, as did some of his notions about the very libertarian “cult of the individual” that ensures that the individual is more highly valued than society as a whole (although I have trouble believing that this notion scales down in a way that can be usefully applied to the participatory web). He also spoke at some length about the whittling away of media literacy (during the Q&A, not captured in my notes), which I somewhat agreed with.
In the final analysis though, the overriding objections that kept popping up in my head as I listened to Keen (and banged away at these notes) were:
- It’s not as bad as all that! I refuse to believe that the millions of people who are “broadcasting themselves” on YouTube or Flickr or whatever social media space they are engaging with are “ruining” our culture! They are influencing it, yes. And they are redefining it, maybe. But “ruining” it? I don’t see it.
- The absolute terms in which Keen argues are problematic to me — Culture, Expert, Truth. All of these things are up for grabs (and not just as result of web 2.0), and, in my opinion, that is a good thing.
- And, finally, why does it have to be either/or? Can’t we still have our “experts” and our participatory platform at the same time? Does “culture” in the western hemisphere (which is where, by Keen’s own admission, his arguments are based) really just boil down to the singular? Don’t we already have multiple cultures (“high”, “low”, “print”, etc.), and can’t this online culture play nicely alongside the others? It’s that whole Wikipedia/Britannica argument all over again, only Keen has exploded it monumentally. It’s never worked at the micro level and it’s even more tenuous at the macro level.
All that said, it’s never a bad thing when the dominant paradigm is challenged, and for that, I’m thankful to Keen. Also, I’m still going to read his book. And I’ll probably enjoy it. Hopefully as much as I enjoyed listening to him in person.
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