T.H. Huxley Revisited

Posted 17 September, 2007 in Book Reviews |

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen. Doubleday/Currency, $29.95 cloth, 230 pp., ISBN: 978-0-385-52080-5.

Polemic: n. a strong verbal or written attack; (also polemics) the art or practice of engaging in controversial debate or dispute.

– Source: Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Give Andrew Keen credit for this much: the man who has made himself roundly hated amongst the often petty and narcissistic denizens of the blogosphere does not shy away from the nature of his project. On the very first page of The Cult of the Amateur, Keen refers to the book as “a polemic about the destructive impact of the digital revolution on our culture, economy, and values.” Anyone looking for an unbiased, objective report about the current state of our digital culture should take their search elsewhere.

Keen is very angry, in the way only reformed sinners can be. Himself a former Internet maven, “a pioneer in the first Internet gold rush,” Keen had a road-to-Damascus experience on a retreat to Sebastopol funded by O’Reilly Media. What convinced Keen that the glittery new version of the Internet — what Tim O’Reilly had christened “Web 2.0″ — was in fact the harbinger of the downfall of Western civilization was the retreat participants’ insistence on its potential for democratization: “The Internet would democratize Big Media, Big Business, Big Government. It would even democratize Big Experts, transforming them into what one friend of O’Reilly called, in a hushed, reverent tone, ‘noble amateurs.’” (Author’s emphasis.)

It is these “noble amateurs,” Keen argues, the real-world equivalent of T.H. Huxley’s infinite monkeys banging away on their infinite typewriters, who are precipitating a crisis in our culture by dumbing down its discourse and by siphoning jobs and advertising dollars away from established media outlets that have traditionally been the gatekeepers of our collective wisdom and knowledge. This “professional mainstream media,” in Keen’s view, “over the last two hundred years, has reinforced American values and made our culture the envy of the world” — a debatable point, unless you agree that the apogee of culture involves this year’s cinematic box-office blockbuster Are We Done Yet? or Britney Spears lip-synching (badly) at the MTV Video Awards.

But let’s give Keen the benefit of the doubt and assume that he means the larger, Western culture that includes such things as Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte and Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, both of which Keen references in his book. On the limited subject of how the Internet, bereft of quality filters or editorial oversight, allows a large cohort of unskilled, untrained, “noble amateurs” to wantonly express themselves through blogs and videos posted on YouTube, Keen makes a number of solid points.

The whole ideological basis of Web 2.0 involves an opening up of access to media that has traditionally been restricted to experts and trained professionals. Whereas in the past one had to go through journalism school and display some quantifiable ability to write in order to become a reporter for a newspaper, Web 2.0’s contingent of “citizen journalists” are able to publish anything they want — no matter how ill-informed or badly written — all without the benefit of editorial standards, fact checking, or libel restrictions. And anyone with a webcam and an Internet hookup is now free to post videos of themselves dancing in their underwear in their bedrooms or lip-synching to their favourite pop song (which might indeed be an improvement over professional “entertainers” such as Britney, although that’s a subject for another day).

The Internet provides no gatekeepers to vet this content, no editors to ensure quality control or factual accuracy. It is difficult to argue with the premise that, under such conditions, much — though not all — of what gets published will be untrustworthy at best.

Moreover, it is difficult to argue with Keen’s assertion that, although the new media may be democratic in its access, it is not able to bestow talent upon an untalented mass of content generators. Talent, sad to say for those proponents of “democratized” media, is not democratic, it is hierarchical. Some have it, others don’t.

Those talented writers and critics who used to find outlets for their creativity through employment in national newspapers and magazines, or by publishing books with reputable houses, are being squeezed out of the market by a ballooning number of untalented hacks posting their ravings on their free blogs or using self-publishing technologies such as Lulu.com (the digital era’s answer to a traditional vanity press) to unleash on the world writing that is not competent enough to get accepted by a traditional publisher. The result is that, as more and more people drift to the Internet and its free (although often less authoritative or high-quality) content, professional media organs are forced to lay off staff and reduce their own content outputs, which results in a diminution of our cultural heritage.

This much of Keen’s argument is right on the money (so to speak). However, Keen seems unable to imagine a situation in which a writer, for example, who has broken into the traditional realm of publishing, either in book form or as a journalist, might voluntarily choose to provide content over the Internet, often for free. Neil Gaiman and William Gibson are both well-respected, published authors, and both maintain personal blogs online. Keen has no rebuttal for this, no reckoning with why such authors might choose to do this, or whether they are contributing to the erosion of cultural authority that he is so exercised about.

Or take a more personal (Keen would say, with some justification, narcissistic) example. Your humble correspondent is a professional book critic, with publication credits in the Edmonton Journal, Quill & Quire, and Books in Canada. If I review The Cult of the Amateur online, on my personal site, without accepting payment for my review, do I suddenly become less authoritative, does my knowledge base, experience, or ability to construct a coherent sentence suddenly vanish? Keen provides no answers for these questions.

Further, it would be easier to accept Keen’s argument for the professional standards of traditional media as against the lack of any standards online, if Keen himself were more scrupulous with his facts. Over the course of his increasingly hysterical screed, he refers to Nick Hornby, the author of High Fidelity, as “Nick Hornsby,” adds an “e” to the surname of Dick Wolf, creator of Law and Order, refers to the indie band The Scene Aesthetic as “The Sound Aesthetic,” and misidentifies one of their songs, referring to it in the same paragraph variously as “Beauty on the Breakdown” and “Beauty in the Breakdown.” He also gets the title of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground wrong, leaving out the direct object, but perhaps this is just a result of working from a bad translation. Regardless, Keen’s assertion that editorial oversight provides for more factually authoritative content would carry significantly more weight were these mistakes not so prevalent in his own work.

He also commits what could be called “the Michael Moore error” of willfully ignoring information that doesn’t fit his argument. On the subject of the disappearance of independent, bricks-and-mortar bookstores such as Duttons, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Coliseum Books, et al., Keen lays the totality of the blame for their demise at the feet of “cut-priced e-competition from the Internet,” completely eliding the erosive influence of big-box bookstores such as Barnes and Noble or Borders and the predatory deep discounts offered by large chains such as Costco and Wal-Mart.

On the subject of children being exposed to pornography online, Keen cites a study of 1,500 ten- to seventeen-year-old Internet users conducted by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. That study “found that of the 42 percent of kids who were exposed to online pornography, 66 percent reported that this exposure was ‘unwanted.’” It appears not to have occurred to Keen that ten- to seventeen-year-old kids, asked in a telephone survey whether they intentionally sought out pornography online, might be inclined to lie in their responses.

He is also prone to hyperbole without evidentiary backup, to wit: “The pasting, remixing, mashing, borrowing, copying — the stealing — of intellectual property has become the single most pervasive activity on the Internet.” (Author’s emphasis.) There is no evidence for this assertion; Keen doesn’t provide a footnote or a reference to indicate where this information comes from, or whether it is merely anecdotal speculation on his part.

All of which is a shame because, in his core concerns about the erosion of copyright, the death of the expert at the hands of the “noble amateur,” and the loss of paid jobs for trained content providers, Keen does offer much food for thought. It is unfortunate that the knee-jerk reaction of many bloggers has been to reject him out of hand, often without giving him the benefit of actually reading what he has to say. It is equally unfortunate that Keen himself provides so much ammunition for his detractors to dismiss, ignore, or reject his very legitimate concerns.

1 comment to “T.H. Huxley Revisited”

Leona, February 1st, 2008 at 3:57 am:

• I don’t even want to give this blowhard credit for giving us food for thought. I imagine he would have been one of the fellows trying to stop Gutenberg from making the Bible accessible to the common man, or who would have written a polemic about what the movies had done to Vaudeville if he’d lived in those times. I wrote to The Scene Aesthetic to see if they agree that MySpace is preventing them from getting a real record deal. Based on the work I do with musicians, I would guess not. If they respond (I just sent the e-mail & found you while looking to see if the issue had already been addressed online), I’ll put our correspondence on my blog. I think you were way to generous in your review!

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