I didn’t know what to expect from this presentation — antichrist; or thoughtful, well presented arguments. I couldn’t go along with many of the proclamations that he made, but I couldn’t disagree with most of his arguments. The anarchy isn’t going away, and there’s value in it. The key is helping students to become literate in terms of today’s information landscape.
Again, this is live blogged, so please excuse typos and awkward wording.
Andrew Keen says, “So instead of a dictatorship of experts, we’ll have a dictatorship of idiots.” He’s from England with fond memories of taking his motorcycle from library to library, where he, at one time, had 90 books checked out at one time. The speaker is Andrew Keen.
He want’s to talk about the book, his thinking during the writing of the book, and his thinking afterward. He approached the book wondering if the future will be Orwellian (1984) or Huxleyan (Brave New World). He use to be a journalist for a Music magazine that published about high quality music and music equipment. “The media business is about finding the talent, refining it, and selling it.”
He’s not a luddite, though he has a business card that says, “Andrew Keen, the Antichrist of Silicon Valley.” Years ago, he sipped from the coolaid, and he founded a company called Audio Cafe. Ultimately digital will triumph over paper.
Keen says that the biggest weakness of the book, is that he treats the Internet as a person. The Internet isn’t killing anything. It’s tools, and it’s controlled by people. We are killing our culture through our miss-use of the Internet. The Cult of the Amateur is about us.
Something very profound is going on. There is a cultural challenge to authority. We’re seeing a more and more personalized culture. [This is true. Kids are creating their own culture. He’s going along with what Zukkerman was talking about Internet Me.]
The individual is becoming increasingly empowered. Traditional notions of authority are fading away. People know more than their leaders. Citizenship is being replaced by consumerism.
The Internet came out of the 1960s hippies, power to the people mentality. [In reality, the Internet came from the U.S. military, but his point is valid.]
There’s no wisdom in Google. There is more search engine wisdom in this room than in all of Google, and the librarians are paid for it. Google’s service comes from it’s users use of the tool. It gets better the more we use it, but not smarter, not wiser.
He says, “Now we don’t need to rely on Thomas Freedman to know what’s happening in the Middle East.” We have the power to know through each other. No expertise needed.
Keen got an invitation to O’Reily’s FOOCamp in 2004, an unconference. Unconference is anarchy in practice. He says that everyone was blogging and podcasting, but no one was listening.
The biggest problem is that the traditional media is being undermined. The authority of experts is being undermined. People are loosing their jobs. There is value in YouTube and in the blogosphere, but it’s hard to find it. Traditional media finds and refines the talent and makes it available.
I says at the ending that, “The reality is that things are not that bad.” He’s actually optimistic now.
Hi David – Based upon what you wrote in your blog and the link to Wikipedia (I clicked Mr. Keen’s photo) — What’s wrong with trying a dictatorship of idiots, the dictatorship of elitists doesn’t seem to be working too overly well for the world right now.
I strongly believe that “idiots” have a natural and inherent right for our voices to be heard. How have we been able to do this in the past — with great difficulty as the elites have tightly controlled access to the media, vigorously stifling the voice of dissenting views. The internet leveled the information distributions streams and has made it very difficult for elitists to simply dictate information to the populace and ignore those they consider beneath them. “They” don’t like it when we dare to question or heaven forbid — offer a different opinion (that is “sometimes” well thought out, based on actual facts/experience, comes to a different conclusion than their own and is correct).
Well I will get off my soapbox. Yes there is a certain amount of narcissism involved in blogging, but it sure beats the old way of doing things. Isolating people and attempting to make mushrooms out of them. Can’t tell where I stand on this on? Harold
Web 2.0 “worships the creative amateur”, and I agree–at least it does right now. And though I believe (hope) we’ll learn good measures to filter out the crap, the fact that many amateurs with actual talent are also flocking to web-based publishing reminds me that there may be something wrong with the publishing industry. Take book publishing as a small anecdote: many of the major book publishers are co-owned or co-controlled, and they in fact share rejection lists. Before one could send a manuscript to 20 publishers with the hope that one might pick it up. Now if you get rejected by the first one, that publisher may notify or at least share that rejection info with the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc, tainting their objectivity.
5tein,
Do you really think that Keen is talking about new distribution of high-quality work?
Hi, I am sitting with a friend of yours, Diana Freeman! She has been doing a wonderful job with our Alphasmart training, sharing her Geocaching passion and much more.
PS Sounds like Keen was a bit of a yawn.
I believe Web 2 is allowing us to challenge some of the traditional controlling forces of the publishng world – a great example that I’m currently hooked into is a blog tracking how the education system might respond to a global pandemic http://www.dominieschronicle.blogspot.com it’s writing like this that will ultimately shift the balance of power in the publishing power of big business.
The “shifting the balance of power away from big business stuff” may be a fantasy. Yesterday’s news headline was that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo so that there are only two players left in the world of Internet search and advertising.
It took “old media” decades to consolidate like “new media” has done in just a few years.
The underlying notion of this man’s insanity is that he is upset that the information oligarchy is losing influence and control over what you/we need to know. Apparently, gathering information and making up one’s own mind is a dangerous. We should just let the “experts” tell us what to think/like/believe in.
. . . elite loose control of the populous because the populous gains empowerment through information, populous degrades government (you are prime example), thus government looses authority, anarchy begins to encroach, populous because uncomfortable and needs stability – government has lost credibility, industry steps in and populous is now controlled by consumerism instead of government. . . .
“The authority of experts is being undermined.”
Interesting thought. I have begun to understand that with the information explosion, everyone can be an expert as soon as the information is published.
Actually, I don’t think it is all bad…
Maybe instead of him saying the Authority of experts has been undermined, he should say “the authority of experts has been democratized.”