The Modern Journalist

Book Review: The Cult of the Amateur

Research for a book means reading lots of other books, finding out what discussions other experts in your field are having and parsing out the salient points they miss.

For all intents and purposes, this is social media for authors. Those of us who still love the written word and long form.

During my research, I came across Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur (Doubleday 2007). The reason I picked it up: the premise is antithetical to mine. Keen purports that the rise of social media and mediated culture is a great threat to the grand traditions of Western culture, slowly turning us into a nation of non-thinkers who don’t value elitism and institutional knowledge.

Keen, a former start-up entrepreneur who founded the Audiocafe.com, who now blogs and produces podcasts about social media.

The irony should not be lost that Keen is a self-labeled amateur writer who now produces social media content about the downfall of society because of social media.

But there is so much more about this book that is blatantly wrong — and at times downright offensive.

Keen’s main meme is that elitism — those who have a formal, vetted point of view — should be held in much higher regard than the “crowd,” which is the main source of knowledge in social media.

In that regard, it’s not difficult to disagree. Knowledge means something, otherwise, school would be useless and we’d never try to pass that knowledge to future generations.

However, his characterization of how crowd-based knowledge systems work is — at best — amateurish in its description.

I’ll focus much of this review on his characterization of how journalism works since it’s clear that Keen has never actually worked for an extended period of time within a newsroom.

(Of course, the irony that I’m using his own lack of understanding as a counter-argument to his assertion that elitism is important is there. However, he is a crowd of one, purporting to expert on things he is not. He is not engaging in a public discourse on what should be done.)

His assertion that newspapers and magazines are flailing because of Craigslist is only correct if you assume — which Keen and others do — that the fundamental problem with social media is that current media business models are the correct ones.

Indeed, Keen templates his understanding of the traditional world onto the modern world, assuming that interactivity, social media, read/write, databases and the crowd can be corralled in exactly the same way they always have been.

It’s as if technology is the reason — not the Titanic-like refusal of business to change — that failure is happening. Keen is killing the wrong man, believing the elitist of the past — those who understand traditional business — should have inherent right to understand the future without work.

He also assumes people believe technology can only be used for good, when in fact — gasp — sometimes people use it nefariously. As if history of humanity isn’t saturated with people corrupting institutions for the betterment of themselves. (Generally, the elites who have control over the masses, for what it’s worth.)

He continues, arguing that ownership has become an amorphous entity in the digital world, with copyright and intellectual property — which have more stringent laws today than at any time in the history of our country — is slipping away. Soon, he argues, nobody will be able to make money doing anything of value because the Internet has changed the rules.

That IP continues to be our nation’s number one export is of no actual importance to this argument.

These unedited masses, producing untrustworthy materials, Keen writes, will make us do the unthinkable: question what we read.

With more and more of the information online unedited, unverified, and unsubstantiated, we will have no choice but to read everything with a skeptical eye. (p46)

His theme — that corporate elitism makes right — is a stunning blow to the very foundation of knowledge that he says he believes in. (That he spends almost no time backing up such blind assertions should be of no concern to people. He is an expert, although an admitted amateur writer and reporter.)

What Keen gets completely wrong — so completely as to render his ranting about technology and its users — is that traditional outlets have lost readers because they haven’t adapted to the modern readers’ communication style and haven’t embraced the new functionalities of the technology to capitalize on emerging story forms.

(Again, his assertion on page 56 that print on-demand isn’t a viable way to publish books discounts the largest distributor of books, Lightning Source, is owned by a distributor and is used by major publishing companies. In fact, if you buy his book from Amazon, it may be print on-demand.)

He blasts the anonymity of the Internet and Web as well, claiming that those in power are forced to stand up and be held accountable for their words and actions. He misses, though, that those who hide online are oftentimes discounted as not credible because they have violated the law of the land: stand and disclose.

Nowhere else is there such a level playing field.

He then argues that social media sites such as Digg encourage the collective to aggregate not to what is right, but what is popular. Again, he fails to address that we have until now listened only to what major corporate media and traditional media have told is right. The revisionist history of journalism and media — this Orwellian approach to knowledge — strikes at the heart of his argument.

If Doubleday would publish such unsubstantiated rumor and half-truth, shouldn’t we question what emanates from them? Shouldn’t we question what comes next?

Finally, he extols the virtue of the Editor As God model, claiming that those who run newspapers and magazines know best what is important in the world while openly mocking those non-journalists (did we suddenly need a certificate to practice?) who have gathered large followings online by become experts in their field.

One is an instrument of an institution, another is an institution of one.

Keen’s analysis of the social media sphere and the use of modern technology is an epic failure of understanding, an application of traditional knowledge placed upon a cursory understanding of the institutions of knowledge and media.