[Publib] 2.0: It cheapens us, it cheapens everyone

[Joe Schallan]

This book from last summer got under my radar and I
have just discovered it. Since it directly relates to
my recent remarks on crowdsourcing, I thought I'd
share an excerpt with the list:

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur -- How Today’s
Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our
Economy, New York: Doubleday/Currency, 2007.

Blurb: In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic,
Silicon Valley insider Keen exposes the grave
consequences of today's new participatory Web 2.0. He
reveals how amateur, user-generated free content
threatens the very innovation and creativity that
forms the fabric of American achievement. 


>From Chapter 1:

. . . democratization, despite its lofty idealization,
is undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and
belittling expertise, experience, and talent. As I
noted earlier, it is threatening the very future of
our cultural institutions.

I call it the great seduction. The Web 2.0 revolution
has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more
people—more depth of information, more global
perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate
observers. But this is all a smokescreen. What the Web
2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial
observations of the world around us rather than deep
analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered
judgment. The information business is being
transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a
hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking
about themselves.

Moreover, the free, user-generated content spawned and
extolled by the Web 2.0 revolution is decimating the
ranks of our cultural gatekeepers, as professional
critics, journalists, editors, musicians, moviemakers,
and other purveyors of expert information are being
replaced (“disintermediated,” to use a FOO Camp term)
by amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun
moviemakers, and attic recording artists. Meanwhile,
the radically new business models based on
user-generated material suck the economic value out of
traditional media and cultural content.

- - - - - - - -


Keen could have added "reference librarians" to his
list of purveyors of expert information whose ranks
are being decimated, of course.

Excellent coverage of the book and the issues it
raises may be found on the BBC website:

http://tinyurl.com/2ju5sz


Librarians, ever eager, in their inexhaustible
insecurity, to emulate the latest fad to prove their
hipness and coolness, have come up with "Library 2.0,"
a term which, as near as I can tell, means we will
embrace all the various social-networking sites and
tools to reach our patrons, in a sort of vast,
blissful emailochattic, facebooky, myspaceish,
ningytwittery, blogospheric, flickristic,
picasametric, mahalodic, youtubian, wikidly
del.icio.us informational orgasm.

If any of you heard Joe Janes at Internet Librarian in
Monterey, you know he excoriated librarians who gripe
about Wikipedia's authority and accuracy but who do
not join the Wikipedians to make the source better.

Given Keen's analysis, perhaps the correct response to
Wikipedia is precisely NOT to participate in it.

I'd further ask, Why we should give away our expertise
for nothing?  Kindle Ask NowNow thinks our expertise
is worth exactly two cents an answer, and at that
rate, the Mechanical Turks aren't making even
third-world sweatshop wages. Not even remotely close,
if you do the time and the math. Sure incentivizes
delivery of high-quality information, eh?

The crowning glory of our profession was once its
insistence on accuracy and authority.

Should we not, finally, continue to insist? Isn't such
insistence what makes us, finally, what we are?

Joe Schallan
Phoenix



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