I’d been hearing rumblings about a new book, The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen, for a while now — its apparently a screed against the Internet for allowing amateur purveyors of information, opinion, and art to swamp the traditional, expert, professional providers of such things. I have not read the book, and am certainly curious to see what he manages to marshal by way of evidence or persuasive argument, as I am most certainly already skeptical of his central premise. But Lawrence Lessig, who apparently was privy to an early copy, has already sharply and beautifully taken Keen and his book to task. No surprise, Lessig disagrees with Keen’s argument, and no surprise, Lessig shows up in Keen’s book as a champion of the amateurish Internet. But Lessig performs a surgical smackdown, noting not only Keen’s mischaracterization of Lessig’s position, but a series of fundamental and painfully obvious errors and overstatements that, he notes, are endemic to the book.
Lessig goes so far as to winkingly suggest that, in fact, Keen is defending the amateur, by demonstrating that the old model — major publisher anoints expert author to say authoritative things to mass audience — can produce just as much crap as the Internet does.
Well, Keen, you wanted a return to the authority of experts. You got one.
Lessig is bringing up sideways a point I like to tackle head-on in my classes. I find the most interesting aspect of these phenomena (be it Wikipedia or blogging or YouTube or Amazon recommendations) is the way that they force is to recognize that the established mechanisms and institutions of information and culture (be it Encyclopedia Brittannica or The Wall Street Journal or NBC or Consumer Reports) are themselves socially produced, historically contingent, institutionally bound, and systematically imperfect systems. They too have an implicit, built-in philosophy of where knowledge and culture come from and how one knows to trust or appreciate it, they too are structurally better at getting at some things and worse at others, they too can be mishandled or exploited. This is not to say that we should adopt a relativist position, that any way of producing information is okey-dokey. We can have a discussion about specific kinds of resources are best served by particular arrangements, some of which may benefit from wider, amateur participation, others benefiting from more bound, trained communities. But it obligates us to give up this kind of comfortable certainty we enjoy about those traditional forms, the social authority they have built up over time that cloaks their imperfections. And just as much as the Internet and its applications may be highlighting this, the traditional institutions of knowledge are doing a fine job revealing their own weaknesses all by themselves — from the failure of the political press to challenge the run up to war in Iraq, to the diminishing cultural relevance of major label music, to the crushing consolidation of corporate radio , etc etc.