"The Cult of the Amateur"
If we are all amateurs, there are no experts.
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Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur is the latest addition to the Newsnight book club. In it, the author expresses his concern for the profligacy of online amateurism, spawned by the digital revolution. This, he feels, has had a destructive impact on our culture, economy and values.
He says, “[They] can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels”.
He complains that blogs are “collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture”.
He claims that Wikipedia perpetuates a cycle of misinformation and ignorance, and labels YouTube inane and absurd, “showing poor fools dancing, singing, eating, washing, shopping, driving, cleaning, sleeping, or just staring at their computers.”
He warns that old media is facing extinction – “say goodbye to experts and cultural gatekeepers – our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios.”
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At the 2005 TED Conference, Kevin Kelly told the Silicon Valley crowd that we have a moral obligation to develop technology. “Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano,” he said. “Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film.”
But technology doesn’t create human genius. It merely provides new tools for self-expression. And if the democratized chaos of user-generated Web 2.0 content ends up replacing mainstream media, then there may not be a way for the Mozarts, Van Goghs, and Hitchcocks of the future to effectively distribute or sell their creative work.
Instead of developing technology, I believe that our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur. We need to reform
rather than revolutionize an information and entertainment economy that, over the last two hundred years, has reinforced American values and made our culture the envy of the world. Once dismantled, I fear that this professional media—with its rich ecosystem of writers, editors, agents, talent scouts, journalists, publishers, musicians, reporters, and actors—can never again be put back together. We destroy it at our peril.
So let’s not go down in history as that infamous generation who, intoxicated by the ideal of democratization, killed professional mainstream media. Let’s not be remembered for replacing movies, music, and books with YOU! Instead, let’s use technology in a way that encourages innovation, open communication, and progress, while simultaneously preserving professional standards of truth, decency, and creativity. That’s our moral obligation. It’s our debt to both the past and the future.
There is also an excerpt from the first chapter of the book, posted with the news story.
I'd say that music and news are definitely feeling the affects of "amateurs" more than any other industry.
The film industry, however, seems unaffected, as they have a much tighter control over what gets seen (in theaters), and amateurs also face a lot more difficulties based on not having enough money/resources/man-power to compete with the big-screen films.
Music, on the other hand, is (relatively) cheap to make, and it's very easy to make a "professional" sounding recording with a weekend of time and a couple hundred dollars spent. Add in all the different venues for upping music online, and you get a scene that is ridiculously overcrowded, with no quality control whatsoever.
