Kneeling down to media rulers: Andrew Keen and the fear of Web 2.0

By now most people who read anything online have heard about a book by Andrew Keen, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture” (eg, at Audible).

Keen’s book is not well reviewed, but it its scathing criticism of the internet and user-generated content as lethal threats to culture is certainly attracting a lot of attention. Keen gives a good summary of his views in an interview on CBC’s The Sunday Edition (details at bottom).

Keen holds that traditional, professional sources of media are a meritocracy of professionals, providing an elite service to our society and serving the best information and perspectives because they are experts at doing just that. Web 2.0 content (and web-delivered content quite generally) is, on the other hand, painted by Keen in one broad stroke as amateur and irrelevant, promoted by an “oligarchy of web 2.0 activists”. The prominence of the internet and digital media is in Keen’s world a threat to our very culture, diluting the core, quality content of the arts, undermining iconic providers of information like big newspapers and networks, and assaulting us with pointless user-generated drivel.

Perhaps the greatest failing of Keen’s perspective, holding large media outlets as a higher form of information providers, lies in the nature of big media itself. Although traditional media delivery formats are challenged, the concentrated corporate ownership of media has not slowed; mainstream access to news and information comes from only a few actual sources, and those sources clearly exercise a great deal of censorship and selectivity in determining what news and culture we see and how it is presented to us. Where, exactly, does Keen’s “reliable, honest, competent media” exist?

At a Murdoch-owned newpaper like the New York Post?

On Fox News?

On a Clear Channel-owned radio station?

At an HMV outlet?

“Reliable, honest, competent media”?

To be fair, Keen himself points out that a lot of garbage flows from mass media. But unfortunately the few, ideal examples he refers to repeatedly (BBC, Guardian, NYT, NPR, etc.) are the exceptions to the mass media rule – not the the actual rulers.

Keen’s “cultural gatekeepers” are, simply, the most powerful journalists and media companies – the true oligarchy of our media and culture. I’d rather not entrust culture to a corporate journalist or CEO; thanks just the same Andrew.

Reference:
CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition.  (xml podcast feed | Andrew Keen interview mp3)