The Cult of the Amateur

The 2004 O’Reilly-hosted FOO Camp (“countercultural Sixties meets the free-market Eighties meets the technophile Nineties”) is where Andrew Keen experienced a life-changing epiphany. As attendees proclaimed the democratisation of “media, information, knowledge, content, audience, author” by Web 2.0, and the demotion of “big experts” to “noble amateurs”, Keen was seized by a strong sense of unease that led to the writing of The Cult of the Amateur – an expose of the consequences of Web 2.0, the unleashing of user-generated content and the disintermediation of society’s cultural gatekeepers. As a consequence of this process, Keen argues, we can expect information to become steadily less reliable and more chaotic.

Most of us are aware of the devastation being wrought in industries such as music and newspapers. Keen argues that as professional content creators are forced to compete economically with free content, there are simply less resources with which to generate high quality creative works. As he says:

To make a top-quality recording today… an “exquisitely slow and detailed album… ideally would take a full year and, given the price of top contemporary musicians, could cost a million dollars. But this kind of investment… can’t be earned back in a market where people are buying fewer and fewer compact discs. So recording artists necessarily compromise their music because it is not economically viable to hire the best musicians and take enough time making the recording.

He also defends professional journalism, arguing forcibly that at best, citizen journalism can only ever complement professional journalism unless we are to resign ourselves to second-rate poorly-informed information:

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent of the Independent newspaper, for example, didn’t hatch from some obscure blog – they acquired their in-depth knowledge of the Middle East by spending years in the region.

Despite my reservations around the record of professional journalists for delivering a consistently in-depth and accurate view of conflicts such as the second Gulf War (weren't they essentially spoon-fed information from the military?), or the political demonstrations of the
past in which numbers were consistently under-reported, for example, I think that his arguments around the importance of professional journalism are important, not only in intellectual but also in democratic terms.

I’m hugely sympathetic with Keen at a cultural level. I hate the thought of snippets of content becoming so prevalent that people no longer read a book in a linear fashion – have we collectively thought about the intellectual consequences of this? And I do share his nostalgia for Tower Records – in my case based in Piccadilly Circus, just round the corner from Haymarket in London, where I worked for years in my 20s. Yes it sometimes feels like the soul has been taken out of music. Stuart Maconie recently reported on radio 2 that over 40% of people no longer listen to a complete musical track let alone album – they get what they want from it emotionally, and then move on. What room is there for the pop grower, let alone the complexity of classical or operatic works?

But, on the other hand, not everyone had access to the rich variety of music on offer at Tower Records in LA or London, whereas now the cultural divide between kids in Manchester and kids in, say, the Lake District, must surely be narrowing as access to culture levels off with ubiquitous internet availability.

He makes a very very important point with regard to Web 2.0 user-generated content, namely that it is to a great extent dependent on professionally produced content i.e. it’s highly derivative, and yet it is simultaneously destroying that content.

So basically, at the level of description at least, I find much to applaud in The Cult of the Amateur. And that’s really what I expected from this book. I truly expected to identify some sort of soul sibling who shared my commitment to ensuring intellectual integrity in a Web 2.0 context, but who nevertheless espoused new technologies in terms of their potential for furthering human progress.

However early on in the book I started to get a bit concerned. It started here, in the introduction:

It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule, on steroids.

Plus…

…if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece.

And…

… instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys – many of them with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins – are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

References to “mob rule” and comparisons of human beings with monkeys seemed to me to be a highly elitist and dangerously anti-human articulation of concerns around cultural decline. Why is Keen deploying such unattractive arguments? Personally I’d say it’s a consequence of the overall faultiness of his critique. Keen argues that reasoned informed analysis is now in short supply, as we become swamped with inexpert user-generated content. Yes, Web 2.0 may have exacerbated that trend, and it has certainly surfaced it. But is Web 2.0 really to blame? Did
some golden era of informed analysis come abruptly to an end in 2004 when a bunch of moneyed Californian geeks (that most of us have never heard of) went off camping together?

Keen’s deepest concern is a feeling that truth itself is under threat:

This undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse,
encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft, and stifling creativity.
When advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between
fact and fiction becomes blurred.

Surely Keen can’t be arguing that the “undermining of truth” began with the inception of Web 2.0 technologies? I’m no expert on philosophy, but didn’t cultural relativism start to gather force way back almost half a century ago in the 1960s? Yet he does seem to be saying that:

Yes, that means that if the community changes its mind and decides that two plus
two equals five, then two plus two does equal five.

The problem is that by failing to trace back intellectual trends historically, Keen seems to be leading us irresistibly to the conclusion that only Web 2.0 can be the cause. Isn’t it more helpful,
though, to see Web 2.0 as a phenomenon that became technically feasible precisely at a point in history where humanity’s uncertainty about its mission has deepened over a period of time, and society has fragmented to the point that:

every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is
just another person’s version of the facts.

So I see the value in Keen’s descriptions of the web’s impact in areas such as music, industry and books. But I’m less certain about his ability to analyse that impact in terms of underlying causes and forces at play.

It’s a very enjoyable and engaging read though. The sheer vitriol is immensely entertaining, not to say refreshing in this politically correct world in which so many of us shy away from forthright statements of conviction.

But towards the end I came to understand that it wasn’t just the analysis that was a problem. Many of my disagreements are rooted in the fact that Keen’s motives for writing the book were at variance from my motives for reading it. When Keen writes that “our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur”, I perceive that
his interests are too narrow to enable him to write the book I want him to write.

It is surely time to examine dispassionately at the broadest level what is gained and what is lost with user-generated content. But maybe that will only become possible once we collectively re-engage with the realm of ideas and re-gain an understanding of what we need them for.