I heard the promo for the interview this morning, but missed it so I went here and listened to the interview with Andrew Keene, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. In the interview, he sums up his thesis by saying that the Internet "fundamentally undermines the authority of the mainstream media." I could dismiss such a statement with a snarky one-liner, or I could examine it in detail. I guess I shall try to do both: This is a bad thing?
The mainstream media, which Keen defines as "professional journalism, professional recorded music, newspapers, television, radio, and publishing", is indeed undermined on a broad front by the rise of user-generated content - wikipedia, YouTube, etc.; Keen describes them as "often corrupt" (a pretty heavy charge which upon which he refuses to elaborate) - but one wonders what, exactly, the problem is. Keen fails to defend his position substantively, except to say, in an example of great importance, that one compare the blogosphere and newspapers. This is the perfect example of setting up a straw argument. With the exceptions of Talking Points Memo, the live-blogging Fire Dog Lake did at the Scooter Libby trial, and the on-line editions of various newspapers and periodicals, blogs are not news organs, but commentary organs. They are, to use Joe Klein's infelicitous phrase, "parasitic" upon the mainstream media to the exact same extent that the pundits are. The difference, however, is that few of the blogs, whether left or right, of which I am aware, pretend to do anything other than discuss things that are already out there (I suppose Michelle Malkin's site is the exception that proves the rule; she pretends to cover news, and in doing so, undermines her own credibility, but not that of the rest of us because she is the object so much scorn and derision precisely because of her pretensions). It might be wise to compare, say, the op-ed pages of a random paper with the blogs, but then we are getting in to a realm where subjectivity reigns - one likes or dislikes these things based upon one's aesthetic and political preferences. While many mainstream pundits are taken to task for their analytical ability and adherence to certain norms, this is solely up to the discretion of various blog commentators, not a widespread phenomenon.
Keen argues that by undermining the wisdom of our cultural gatekeepers, the professionals, what we have left is "opinion, chaos, a cacophony". Here he is venturing in to territory covered 2500 years ago by Plato, who also disliked discordant public debate. Plato made a distinction between "opinion" and "truth", the former being the unreflective view of the polloi, the latter available only to an elite after the difficult work of dialectical reasoning and debate with others. To the truth so revealed by the professionals there could be no rebuttal because truth was eternal, reflective of those never-changing forms of which all that we encounter was merely a shadow. Keen, it seems, is a Platonist, preferring eternal truth to the wonderful chaos of democracy unbridled. He makes no argument for the alleged wisdom of the professionals. It is an assertion rather than an argument.
Keen refuses to address a question on the idea of cultural gatekeepers, insisting that such an argument is "neo-Marxist". Indeed it may be - it certainly has roots in Marx's discussion of the superstructure; Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukacs both discussed cultural issues extensively - but that does not mean it does not have a great deal of truth to it. There are non-Marxist reasons for questioning the wisdom of our "cultural gatekeepers" as well, not the least of them being the sorry state of our public discourse, the limited nature of much of the music available through major record labels, and the often odd publishing decisions of the major publishing houses. One point of contention Keen discusses is the demise of the independent bookstore as a result of the rise of Amazon (of course the rise of Border's and Barnes & Noble Booksellers aren't discussed at all), and Keen quotes, not favorably, that the shuttering of our independent book stores is "roadkill". This begs a question that can be argued back and forth, over the issue of capitalism and culture: Do we support the changes capitalist innovation (and sometimes the abuse of power brought about by the concentration of economic power) or do we use various state and non-state powers to uphold an antiquated cultural status quo? It would seem Keen would prefer the latter.
I hardly know what to say to the argument Keen makes in this interview (I have much too much reading to do to claim I will buy his book and read it anytime soon). What his argument comes down to, it seems to me, is this - People have the audacity to take control of the cultural life of the nation, rather than leaving it to those unelected, unappointed individuals who run our major cultural institutions; the result is a jumble of voices and views, with no end in sight. This is unacceptable, and we need to return to the days when our cultural decisions were made for us by those who were paid to make them for us.
Is this awful stuff or what?
Virtual Tin Cup
