Is the Web a threat to culture?

Andrew Keen
The Cult of the Amateur
How today's internet is killing our culture 
240pp. Nicholas Brealey. Paperback, £12.99.
978 1 85788 393 0
US: Doubleday. $22.95.
978 0 385 52080 5

Software publishers like to indicate major revisions to their products with a whole number (“Windows 3.0”), keeping decimal fractions (“Windows 3.1”) to mark merely incremental changes. Tim O’Reilly, publisher of books on the internet, thus coined (and swiftly trademarked) the term “Web 2.0” in 2004 to suggest that the World Wide Web was undergoing a thorough transformation. He illustrated the difference between the old Web and the new by contrasting Britannica online, the digital manifestation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia assembled by volunteers. In his book The Wealth of Networks (2006), Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law at Yale University, also points to Wikipedia and similar projects as transformational, arguing that the individually volunteered rather than institutionally controlled content of Web 2.0 reflects not merely technological, but also cultural change. Andrew Keen, too, in his new book, The Cult of the Amateur, summons Wikipedia. But where Benkler, like O’Reilly, argues in its defence, Keen rises for the prosecution, declaring that such manifestations of the new Web defer abjectly to amateurism, and as such represent an assault on “our economy, our culture, and our values”.

Some concept of culture, then, stands at the centre of these opposing accounts of the internet, but what concept isn’t completely clear. Benkler’s catholic view might defend Raymond Williams’s democratic notion that “culture is ordinary”. Keen certainly wouldn’t. In his eyes, it is the “collective cry for a democratized media” that threatens “the very future of our cultural institutions” and is consequently something from which we need to be defended.

Perhaps only an expatriate Englishman, as Keen is, could launch so unapologetic an attack on “democratization” in America, where many accept that if democracy is good, then more democracy is better. Yet American history is not, as some popular accounts would have it, an unstoppable march from despotism to democracy. It has also involved struggles to restrain democracy’s more extreme enthusiasts. When Anthony Trollope travelled in the North during the Civil War, he was surprised to hear of Union Army units where decision- making was collective. He was less surprised to hear that they had been disbanded under pressure of war. Despite such setbacks, a naive, if fragile, faith in popular democracy endures among technological utopians, many of whom see digital technology as the means towards a more perfect polity (though recent setbacks in electronic voting have caused some to reconsider). In 1990, computer programmers at a Xerox research centre developed an online “world”, where anyone could create characters and through them live out fantasy lives. (It was a forerunner of virtual worlds such as Web 2.0’s Second Life.) When some fantasies proved incompatible with others, the programmers assumed that plebiscites would settle the disputes. They found instead that the disputes only escalated. As a result, the programmers were forced to transform themselves from benign returning officers reading off the ayes and the nays into little dictators issuing electronic ASBOs and expulsion orders.

The Cult of the Amateur suggests that Keen may have gone through a similar transformation. Formerly the head of an internet music start-up, he seems to have discovered that there are pornography and piracy at loose on the Web, while vulgar amateurs, with no regard for authority or expertise, are undermining respected institutions such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the New York Times. Keen is clearly outraged, and his book yearns for the programmers’ power to stamp it all out. Failing that, his last chapter proposes a range of government interventions, few of which are new and fewer likely to be effective. Effective or not, experience tells us that, without careful oversight, government intervention on the net tends to serve the interests of those who lobby Congress. The Recording Industry Association, which Keen champions, has done very well in this way; consumers less so. So before summoning the Feds, we might notice first that Keen’s bill of complaint is not particularly coherent. For example, while there certainly is pornography on the Web and some of it is very disturbing, it is generally the product of professionals of one sort or another, rather than a cult of amateurs. Moroever, internet-based pornography, like several of the issues Keen complains of, was there long before Web 2.0. By his own dating, Britannica stumbled around 1990–91, which even antedates Web 1.0.

Furthermore,while Keen deplores the cult of the amateur for its “superficial observations”, seen as replacing “deep analysis” with “shrill opinions”, he himself is not free from these failings. As he acknowledges in his conclusion to The Cult of the Amateur, he too is an amateur, and by the time we get to this concession, we do not feel either that his argument is profound, or that his tone is calm. His sources are primarily clippings available from online newspaper sites. As bloggers generally draw on much the same stock and use it in much the same way, Keen’s approach works more to vindicate than to damn them. His image of the press as a “noble institution”, staffed by “qualified reporters” and “seasoned editors”, whose stories, “fact-checked, edited, proofread and . . . backed by a trusted news organization”, advance “the integrity of our political discourse” (Keen may have been out of England for some time), is undermined by the rather mawkish clippings he chooses. Nor are blogs, as he would have us believe, merely parasites on the mainstream press. The blog talkingpointsmemo.com, for example, has played an important role in breaking the story which, arguably, led to the resignation of the US Attorney General. And, contrary to Keen’s assertions about their freedom from consequences, American bloggers have faced prison for defending their sources. Finally, even if we accept that not all blogs acknowledge their debts, it should be noted that the idea that Web 2.0 suffers from the cult of the amateur was put forward by the well-known blogger Nicholas Carr (http://roughtype.com) a couple of years ago.

If debates about the internet are turning to examinations of our culture, this is to be welcomed. The turn may reflect an exasperation with the way economic concepts have come to dominate such discussions. Even the New Yorker, the stately home of cultural debate in America, now feels obliged to provide room for a “financial” page. Changes that fall under the heading Web 2.0 do have cultural implications. For example, collectively produced and dynamically changing pages, like those of Wikipedia, unsettle implicit notions about what a page is and how it might be understood, notions that extend back at least to the rise of print culture, if not to the appearance of the codex. The end of the page as we knew it will be unsettling not only for biblio- philes, but even for such Web 2.0 businesses as Google, whose empire depends on its ability to rank pages, and the inherent assumption that with these there is something relatively constant and coherent to rank.

A debate pitting Williamsites such as Benkler, who are in support of expanding popular culture, against Arnoldians such as Keen, who write in defence of a circumscribed “High Culture”, would not be new, but, in the context of the internet, it might nonetheless be worth having. Unfortunately, Keen, who seems happy on the plains, lamenting the loss of NBC programming, is less likely to thrive on the higher altitudes he has chosen. When he approaches the foothills, he is unsure: High Fidelity for example, was not written by Hornsby. As he climbs, he stumbles more: The Decline and Fall was not written by Gibbons; nor did Dickens go on a reading tour of America in 1842. For the moment, it may be better to leave the debate to the economists.
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Paul Duguid is Visiting Professor at the School of Information and Management Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. His book The Social Life of Information appeared in 2000.