The Cult of the Amateur

The Web is full of "user generated nonsense" - is in a nutshell one of the conclusions of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen.

Also more conclusions are that the second coming of the Web will destroy our moral fibre, it will be the downfall of organized Man as we know it, and completely drive every record store in the world out of business.

The author, while taking up this argument on behalf of the well-read, qualified, learned and wise expert is going up against a wall of monumental proportions. For, as is known but is difficult to quantify in terms of actual numbers, for every qualified "creator" of content in this world there are many more, much and many many times more, "consumer as creator" types (such like me and the upwards of 95% of the bloggers out there in the blogosphere) churning out content - be it the written word, the moving image, voice, stills etc. etc. They are creating, editing, moderating, ranking, promoting, eliminating, blacklisting with an energy not seen before. The Wikipedias, the YouTubes, the MySpaces and others like them stand grand testimony to the fact.

I however, enjoyed this read, as I went through chapter after chapter of the rant enjoying with some glee the passion with which the fair name of the Internet Culture was being sullied. It is, in a way thought provoking, for indeed there must be some acknowledgement of the years of effort that has gone into the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom and the subsequent application of that to a creation, any creation, that the learned and the qualified of this world come up with. If you come to think of it, that can continue - where is the need for all this opposition. Its not as if a learned opinion is being denied a place on the Web. It is merely being asked to co-exist with all the other "drivel" out there. Well, the rules for getting your opinion a place in the sun in terms of showing up high in the search engines and getting visibility are the same as for anybody else - so that way its a fair fight. So, I say, why complain - its just that the playing field has just gotten a lot bigger - a lot LOT BIGGER - and is visible to a lot more people than ever before.

There is however merit in what the author says about all this leading to a tremendous waste of time - a very precious commodity in today's world - I fully agree with this. What is needed is a means to be able to retrieve relevant and useful information. If by some means, this can be achieved, where the search engine can return useful, qualified content as opposed to other user-generated rubbish, it could very well turn out to be the next killer app. But who/what decides what is useful and relevant and what is not? I guess thats the first part of the puzzle that needs to be solved before moving onto the next.