The Unlikely Amateurocracy

Andrew Keen thinks that Web 2.0 is killing culture. But is that really possible?

Map of The Internet. (The Opte Project)

Ihave not read Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture. It has predictably not met with a lot of enthusiasm among bloggers and other Web 2.0 fans who are the primary target of Keen’s indictment of narcissistic, decentralized, unprofessional, and ultimately free media content of the supposed Second Internet Revolution. Keen’s thesis, outlined in the author’s own words in this Globe and Mail web forum, is that leaving the professional journalists, musicians, artists, and other producers of what he defines as ‘culture’ unpaid actually destroys it.

Surely, I’d like to believe, his book is far more than some eye-roller “End of” (i.e., science, history, decency) and I’d like to give it more of a chance than some Open Source snobs have provided. But there are problems with this idea. One is that there are many ways to gain money from products that aren’t monetized in and of themselves. The other is that culture is far broader than how Mr. Keen defines it, and that there may be a natural desire among people to find and offer quality content rather than than simply bathe in someone else’s ego. That requires cultural leaders, who may well have something worth buying.

First off, there are plenty of ways for culture-makers to make money without actually selling their core product. Keen uses music as one of his examples of dying culture, but that’s a perfect counter-example. Independent artists, particularly in hip hop, are outsold by their mainstream counterparts by severeal orders of magnitude. Yet the independent musicians still exist, still make money, still produce high-quality products, and sometimes even get radio play. How? They tour. They sell merchandise. They’re featured on other cultural products, like video games, or even in advertising for other products. In hip hop and some other forms of music, the mp3 will never replace wax. And there may even be a place the patronage of the stinking rich and fans who just want to support their favourite artists. All this is besides the fact that radio is alive and prospering (albeit dominated by monopoly interests) and mp3 sales are swift through media like iTunes.

It might not be that different in journalism. Here, the issues are more profound and the implications for democracy are far scarier. Yet print (including web) and television journalism may well have a bright, paid future if the industry and individual companies restructure in the face of the exploding popularity of the Internet. The Globe and Mail, which survived a nasty Canadian newspaper war a few years back and is among the few profitable outfits around, is a perfect example of adapting to change (especially maximizing web readership) while still providing high-quality content. It’s also important to support public broadcasting as a standard to which corporate outfits may aspire. In the United States, PBS is marginal, but in Canada with CBC news, and in many other countries such as Britain, anchor public broadcasters set a public standard and maintain both high regard and ratings in the news department. Perhaps what’s lacking in the United States is that kind of publicly-funded Archimedian point. Either way, there are many ways to make sure high-quality content is properly funded by normal market functions, and when it can’t be so, there are ways of leading by example in the public sector.

Keen’s basic idea—that we should pay professionals for quality content—belies his odd belief that good culture is only that which is paid for. But the value of culture seems to go beyond whether or not it can be rung up at a cash register. Let’s return to journalism as an example. You might say that the two fundamental elements of journalism are reporting and editing. Reporters gather information about what’s happening in the world and put it in context, while the editors decide what’s printed, what’s more important than other stories, and whose voices are most consistently heard. Both jobs are fundamental to democracy. And Keen and others are right to suggest that the former have been decimated in recent years due to corporate cutbacks and greater emphasis on vacuous crap like Paris Hilton. Opinion writing in the form of blogs and even news reporting now has a far stronger, free presence on the Web, which, in a way, dilutes the quality of opinion and reporting. We can debate how badly journalism is hurt by this and for how long.

What we can’t debate is the enduring importance of the editor. These are the people making fundamental decisions about what is important and what is not in news, decisions that reverberate throughout the media business and well into the blogosphere. With the unsorted glut of information that is the Internet, editors may be called upon more than ever by their readership to help separate the chaff from the grain, in news as much as in any other area of culture. For example, it’s because culture leaders in the mainstream media fail to understand and appreciate hip hop music that its chaff is on perpetual loop on the radio. Ultimately this will change, and new culture leaders who actually understand hip hop will step up to the plate. And it’s no different in the world of the World Wide Web, where great reporting and opinion is to be found and placed right up there with the opinion pages of The New York Times, and often is among a newish crop of bloggers and journalists who appreciate the breadth of good journalism no matter what the medium.

Invariably people will pay for good editorial leadership, which I think undercuts Keen’s idea that culture is in trouble. But that’s not the point. Editorial leadership could be provided free of charge (as in certain high-quality blogs, blogrolls and news aggregators) and still be highly valued. All culture, especially highly-decentralized “open source” Internet culture, needs its leadership to provide coherence and context for the billions of web pages out there. No economic shift could possibly change that reality.

In some ways, I gather, Mr. Keen is advocating for elite leadership in culture, which is probably why people peg him as an elitist and a conservative channeling Edmund Burke. Keen is lamenting the possibility that cultural leaders will be swamped by the masses of the radical blogocracy. And if you think about it, that kind of revolution is not such a great thing, even though I think it is highly unlikely to persist, as with the idea of the demise of the editorial board.

But every revolution has its Montaignards. And in this, Keen makes one very good and ironic point: New technologies, which provide for a kind of free-for-all in expression, information access and marketing, empower everyday individuals somewhat but strengthen the positions of traditionally empowered interests—moneyed interests, traditional cultural leaders like editors, and charismatic leaders in charge of great institutions—far more. That’s because these powers have resources, contacts, and organizational power that are simply magnified by the technologies to which so many others are now exposed. That’s Keens point when he mentions Technocrati’s “oligarchy of A-list technology bloggers” in the Globe discussion: The players may change, but the game of hierarchy and competition is still the same in culture, just as in the world of big business. But that means that if, as Keen thinks, paid, centralized institutions and standards define culture, then culture couldn’t possibly die.

Like history, culture and its patrons and customers are always changing, taking on new and unexpected forms that don’t always resemble the old. And surely that makes “the end of culture” as unlikely as the rest of the end-ofs. Nevertheless, what Keen seems to offer, if anything, is the important sobering notion that new technologies, like official histories, are made for the winners. End.