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.

Michael gave me his copy of his Learning Technology Report when he was in town last week. And he inscribed it too! Thanks, Michael!

[I'm way late to this conversation but this just occured to me. Damn! I knew I should have used "Library 2.0" in the title instead.]

• The principles of blog design and usability and how to put those principles to work on your library blog.
• What makes good blog content and how to write content and style guidelines for multi-author blogs.
• Taking RSS further, including how to incorporate RSS feeds into your website and building reading lists with OPML.
• Marketing your blog and RSS feeds.
• Social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us, Furl, and Flickr and their use in libraries.
• Podcasting for content-delivery.

[Technorati tag: cil2006]

Paul is a great speaker — funny, engaging & passionate. He began his presentation with an outline of the four topics he was going to cover:

• libraries and trust
• reaching out from the library
• library 2.0 platform
• shared innovation

Minor aside: the session overview is so crucial. It has the potential to hook your audience or lose them from the get-go. I’m often amazed at the lack of attention paid to the overview. But anyway. Paul’s overview was great — succinct, interesting, and had me looking forward to the rest of the session.

He began with a few high-impact slides, to the effect of: “how do people find stuff?” audience: Google. “How else do people find stuff?” You guessed it: Google – just different iterations of the same tool (google searchbar, google desktop, etc.). He then contrasted this with some findings from a couple of recent studies (OCLC’s Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources and a MORI study that I didn’t get the title of) that prove a few things:

• the number of active borrowers in our libraries has plummeted and continues to fall
• the number of people visiting libraries is on the rise
• 89% of people in the UK trust libraries (the #1 institution when it comes to public trust – more than the BBC!)

So, people are coming into our libraries, and they trust us, but they continue to use Google and other web 2.0 utilities to find things. Begs the question: where did we go wrong? A couple of places:

• we design user interfaces that suck
• we continue to alienate with our jargon

Paul’s response to this disconnect is Library 2.0. Here are the attibutes and goals of library 2.0:

• open the library
• push the library everywhere
• engage with actual and potential user communities
• disaggregate library systems – unpack the big ILS box, take what you need, leave what you don’t, build what you want, and…
• …put it all back together again – library system as lego: build what you want to build, not the picture on the box
• shared innovation – we need to work together, share experiences and innovations, learn from each other.

Paul went on to highlight some of the ways in which libraries and librarians are doing these things already (Casey Bisson’s WPopac, greasemonkey scripts, etc.), making their data work harder, not necessarily for a worthy cause, but often because it simply engages users. His point though was that we should all be doing this together — building a “Library 2.0 platform”, a platform that makes efficient use of our collective development efforts (i.e.: in aggregate, we have more data and more borrowers than amazon has buyers).

I really, really liked Paul’s vision for the Library 2.0 platform especially the bits about the platform needing to cross the vendor divide, because if this has any hope of succeeding, we need to be able to share our data and our ILSs need to be able to “talk” to one another without too much bludgeoning on either end. As Paul noted, we shouldn’t need to change our library systems just to take advantage of the networks that we’re building.

His call to action and conclusions:

• we need to do this together
• this will only work if we all collaborate and participate (that includes vendors)
• we need to share ideas, experiences, code, innovation
• get the discussion rolling at Talis’ Shared Innovation blog
• the library deserves to reach out beyond our walls
• vendor and library initiated silos just don’t make sense
• challenge current business models and assumptions (ditch the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” attitude; everything is fair game and up for grabs)
• share innovation

Paul has posted his presentation slides over at panlibus, definitely give them a read when you have a chance.
[Technorati tag: cil2006]

An interesting thought. I’m not overly fond of the term “technology evangelist”, but I guess I do a lot of that, both at my institution, and as part of the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 talks that I do at other institutions. But for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people in our library world who have been talking about these technologies for a while, the really crucial question I encourage people to ask themselves first is “what need is this going to fulfil or what problem will this fix?” When we implemented a blog at my institution two years ago, it was to fulfill a couple of really specific needs:

• we needed a better way to archive our news stories
• we needed to provide more people with an easy way to add news content (without having to know html)
• we needed an easy way to repurpose news content on the rest of our site

So, yeah, not hard to guess that a blog would fulfill these needs. We went through the same exercise before we implemented our IM reference service last year: we knew that a large number of our users worked virtually, yet we had limited services to assist them (e-mail only). We also knew that most of them were on MSN (as evidenced by a glance at any given public workstation in the library!), so IM reference just made sense.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. There certainly is a cool-factor associated with these “shiny new toys”, but implementing them for the sake of their “shininess” makes no sense. If your library’s cool-factor goes up as a result of implementing any of these tools, that’s a nice incidental benefit (by the way, I don’t think my library’s cool-factor budged when we implemented our blog/rss feeds. When we implemented our IM service? Through the roof. If that means our users like it and will use it, I’ll take it. Is that why we implemented it? Of course not).

• blog design, usability, content
• creating content and style guidelines for library blogs (especially multi-author blogs)
• marketing your library blog/RSS feeds
• wikis
• other social software tools: del.icio.us, Flickr, podcasting

This isn’t an intro course, so participants should have some understanding of what blogs are all about (at minimum), upon which I hope to build and fill in the rest of the social software “picture”. Blogging around here will either (a) remain as quiet as it has been this month, or (b) ramp up feverishly as I develop the course. I’m hoping and aiming for (b), but not making any promises!

Who doesn’t love solutions?

It all started for me some months ago with Will Richardson’s blog and the attractive notion of the participatory web in the classroom; then Library Crunch launched, a blog devoted to “bringing you a Library 2.0 Perspective”; and if that wasn’t enough, Internet Librarian happened, and I positively soaked up all the coverage I could find, and, not surprisingly, much of that coverage was devoted to Web 2.0/Library 2.0 applications (must find a way to get to IL next year). And then last Friday, this article on the Library 2.0 movement quoting all the right library tech luminaries.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been preparing for a few local-ish talks, the first of which is a half-day workshop on Wednesday for the Health Science Information Consortium of Toronto called Web “2.0 @ your Library”. Most of it is the standard how-to-implement-blogs-and-rss-@-your-library stuff, with a hands-on component, but this time I decided to frame the workshop within the context of Web 2.0, and so far, it’s turning out to be my favourite presentation yet. I’ve planned on devoting the first and last 10 minutes of the workshop to talking about Web 2.0 applications for libraries and why these applications matter and, thus far, this framework is making everything in-between a bit more meaningful and providing some much-needed cohesiveness. I’ll let you know how it goes & post the slides when I’m done.