Open Writing

According to one British critic of Web 2.0, I am a monkey. If you are a citizen journalist then he thinks you are a monkey too and that we both sit at our typewriters randomly mashing the keys.

This man of convictions says that nothing you or I write can be trusted. We produce unreliable news, have no connections and have no access to information. If that's not bad enough, we also lack training and expertise.

He is Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy.

I heard of Keen's book when it was published last year but I didn't give it a second thought until one of my journalism professors read extracts aloud in class.

"Most amateur journalists are wannabe Matt Drudges - a pajama army of mostly anonymous, self-referential writers who exist not to report news but to spread gossip, sensationalize political scandal, display embarrassing photos of public figures, and link to stories on imaginative topics such as UFO sightings or 9/11 conspiracy theories."

Excuse me?

I had to read it.

Keen's central thesis is that the popularity of user-generated content is taking money away from the businesses that supply us with professionally produced content, and that this reduces employment opportunities for experts.

He says that our culture is in danger because when the experts can't get jobs we will be left with nothing but mediocre amateurism. This will mean no record companies to pay musicians, no Hollywood to nurture talented actors and no newspapers to showcase professional journalists.

Keen supports his argument with convincing examples of businesses that have already lost out to the Internet. He dwells mournfully on record stores that close because their usual customers are downloading music online. He cites the loss to Hollywood caused by pirated videos and points out that many more people read Wikipedia than the expertly edited Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Throughout the book he comes across as a glass is half-empty kind of chap, taking little time to look at the good that has come out of Web 2.0. He seems to think that there is so much junk on the Internet that talent is hidden and only the "loudest and most opinionated" are noticed.

As any regular Internet user knows, when something is genuinely good, word of mouth spreads quickly through the blogosphere. Successful bloggers such as Bitch Ph.D., Petite Anglaise and Flea owe a lot to their names being passed on in this way.

Of course, the Internet is huge and talented content producers cannot be equally well known to all Web users. People become famous within particular social groups who perhaps share a language, a hobby or a taste in chocolate and this is a reflection of how the real world is. My British Bengali classmate knows who the hot Bollywood stars are, I don't.

Keen takes a more cynical view of social groups on the Web:

"Bloggers today are forming aggregate communities of like-minded amateur journalists … where they congregate in self-congratulatory clusters. They are the digital equivalent of online gated communities where all the people have identical views and the whole conversation is mirrored in a way that is reassuringly familiar."

Who is he talking about? I hope he's not referring to the areas of the blogosphere where women and ethnic and sexual minority groups provide each other with solace and shared knowledge.

There were many things that annoyed me about The Cult of the Amateur, but in particular I didn't like the many generalizations. Not all citizen journalists want to be Matt Drudge, many citizen journalists don't even know who he is because they aren't American.

Keen (strangely for a Brit) has written his book almost entirely in the context of the American experience, which seems shortsighted when Web 2.0 is a global phenomenon with few national boundaries in the free world.

In the pages he devotes to citizen journalism, he also completely fails to acknowledge CJ sites such as OhmyNews where the content is fact checked and edited.

OhmyNews has been on PBS and in Time magazine, so it's not as if it is unknown in America.

He also doesn't ask whether there is any difference between citizen journalism and blogging!

I think The Cult of the Amateur would have benefited from a greater awareness of history and more faith in human nature.

Keen is gloomy about the prospects for musicians if record companies collapse. What on earth does he think musicians did before the invention of record companies?

He wonders about the fate of journalism in the absence of today's big name newspapers. I don't want to see that happen of course, but there will always be journalists who care deeply -- just as there were in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries when newspapers were much smaller enterprises.

The Cult of the Amateur is a thought-provoking book that is by no means stupid and it does raise valid issues. For instance, Keen is right to worry about pedophiles, the accessibility of pornography, identity theft and the safety of our personal data.

In the final chapter he praises approaches that combine user-generated content with the use of editors, so I'm sure he would like OhmyNews -- if he knew about it.

Overall though, he is too pessimistic, makes too many sweeping statements about human behavior and is too subjective. This book is not about the state we're in, it's about one white man's opinion.

Oh, one last thing. I am sure this is not true:

"These days, kids can't tell the difference between credible news by objective journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com."