On Monday night, I heard author Andrew Keen discussing his new book about the impact of the internets on American life:
New Book Looks at the Internet's Impact on American Life
A recently published book by Andrew Keen, titled "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture" takes a look at the impact of the Internet on American life. The NewsHour reports on the book's message.
JEFFREY BROWN: YouTube, MySpace, blogging and so much more, in the past few years, the Internet has been transformed. Where once a person might spend most of his or her time looking at various Web sites, today the focus is on interactivity and social networking, in which people share opinions and videos, in an environment in which anything goes.
We've reported on many of the positive developments in all this, but there are contrarian views. A new book, "The Cult of the Amateur," presents some of these arguments. Its author, Andrew Keen, is himself an Internet entrepreneur who also writes on technology and culture. He joins me now.
(more and link)
Link: http://www.pbs.org/...
I found many of the author's key observations right on point, and I've seen many examples here:
ANDREW KEEN: The key argument is that the so-called "democratization" of the Internet is actually undermining reliable information and high-quality entertainment. By replacing mainstream media content, high-quality radio, television, newspapers, publishing, music, with user-generated content, we're actually doing away with information, high-quality information, high-quality entertainment, and replacing it with user-generated content, which is unreliable, inane, and often rather corrupt.
Is anyone else here troubled by these same concerns? I have my own views, but open this up to discussion in comments.
To those "netrooots activists" who's political activity is limited to the age or tactics of the internets, I'd suggest you consider this point:
ANDREW KEEN: Firstly, I don't think that participation has been something that's been missing from American politics or culture. One can always participate before the Internet. It's not as if the Internet invented, even if some of the Silicon Valley utopians would claim otherwise, it's not as if the Internet has invented collaboration, conversation or community. One only has to read Alexis de Tocqueville to realize that those existed way before the invention of the Internet in America.
Keen's views are complex and not the simplistic main stream media or partian dismissal that "internets is full of hate". So I would hope folks here take these issues seriously.
I found this obervation to be true on many levels here, and devastating:
Internet breeding narcissism
JEFFREY BROWN: Why not, though? Does the technology itself somehow change the dialogue or the output, the intellectual or cultural output?
ANDREW KEEN: My book is not against technology. I'm not against the Internet. I'm not a Luddite. I'm not suggesting that we should switch off the Internet. The Internet itself, particularly the Web 2.0 Internet, is a mirror. When we look at it, we're looking at ourselves
So much traffic here in both Diaries adn comments fits that critique. Front pages tend to be more substantive and reflective, but that can not overcome other strucural flaws that tend to promote a narcisisttic dynamic instead of a substantive dialogue among informed sources (call it elistist if you will, but that response itself suffers from a certain anti-intellectualism).
And how to folks here respond to the echo chamber and fragmentation tendencies of this technology?
Internet as an echo chamber
JEFFREY BROWN: But we have, at the same time -- we've reported a lot on this, about the impact on the mainstream media, for example -- the sense out there that the mainstream media is too narrow, too elite, too controlling, that not enough views are heard, and that the Internet, all of these different -- the blogs, everything -- allows more to be told, allows more to be seen and heard, and allows people to interact with all of that. What is wrong with that?
ANDREW KEEN: I don't believe that's the case. I actually believe that mainstream media is more diverse than the Internet. The Internet has become an echo chamber; it's a place where we go to confirm our own views; it's a place we go to interact with people like us.
Really high-quality newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, shows like yours, include people of very different political, socioeconomic and cultural identities. You don't find that on the Internet. Internet sites fragment our identity, and we congregate at places that look -- that are made up purely of people like ourselves.
So it's fragmenting community. It's doing away with mass media. And mass media is the heart of our civic identity. It's what makes us Americans. It's what makes us citizens.
Sound like a book to read and discuss. I will buy it today.
(and I did not do any search to determine if the book haas already been reviewed adn discussed here, so please, no "gotcha" comments adn don't call me lazy. ssues and ideas should be continuously revissited and discussed.)