Lecture 3: The Cult of the Amateur vs Citizen Media

Following on from last week's lecture on Web 2.0, we're going to explore the pros and cons of the web as platform. With easy-to-use CMS (content management systems) so that blogging, vlogging, etc... are not the sole reserve of *techies* comes the possibility for anyone to say anything. (Sure this might be true with other media but perhaps to a lesser degree).

Andrew Keen's diatribe invoked some concern from a lot of people:

" The people have finally spoken. The media has become their message and the people are self-broadcasting this message of emancipation on their 70 million blogs, their hundreds of millions of YouTube videos, their MySpace pages and their Wikipedia entries.

Yes, the people have finally spoken. And spoken. And spoken.

Now they won't shut up. The problem is that YOU! have forgotten how to listen, how to read, how to watch. Thus, the meteoric rise of Web 2.0's free citizen media is mirrored by the equally steep decline in paid mainstream media and the mass redundancies amongst journalists, editors, recording engineers, cameramen and talent agents. Newspapers and the music business are in structural crisis, Hollywood and the publishing business aren't far behind. We've lost truth and interest in the objectivity of mainstream media because of our self-infatuation with the subjectivity of our own messages. It's what, in "Cult of the Amateur," I call digital narcissism. A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that the essential epistemological anchor of truth. The impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert is replaced by murkiness of the anonymous amateur. When everyone claims to be an author, there can be no art, no reliable information, no audience."

Someone who disagrees with Keen's sweeping statements is David Weinberger who aptly responds:

"But your dichotomy is false. The Web isn't Cinderella facing Gregor "The Cockroach" Samsa in a deathmatch. Despite Time -- which, as a pillar of the mainstream press is of course free of the hyperbole so common on the Web -- the Web isn't even You. It's us. And that is the problem.

Your wildly unflattering picture of life on the Web could also be painted of life before the Web. People chatter endlessly. They believe the most appalling things. They express prejudices that would peel the paint off a park bench. They waste their time watching endless hours of TV, wear jerseys as if they were members of the local sports team, are fooled by politicians who don't even lie convincingly, can't find Mexico on a map, and don't believe humans once ran with the dinosaurs. So, Andrew, you join a long list of those who predict the decline of civilization and pin the blame on the latest popular medium, except this time it's not comic books, TV, or shock jock radio. It's the Web.

[...]

Amateurs aren't driving out the pros, Andrew. The old media are available on line. If some falter, other credentialed experts will emerge. But the criteria governing our choice of whom to listen to are expanding from "Those are the only channels I get" and "I read it in a book" to "I've heard this person respond intelligently when challenged," "People I respect recommend her," and even "A mob finds this person amusing." This is the new media literary, suited to the new abundance."

Andrew Keen on a web2.0 platform, YouTube, presenting (to Google employees) ideas from his book The Cult of the Amateur (what he calls "a subversion of a subversion.")



Have a read of the excellent "Internet Smackdown: The Amateur vs The Professional" by Tony Long in Wired.

Check out these principles of citizen media. How do you think these principles improve the kind of information we might receive?

Video on Citizen Media: