The Cult of the Amateur

Yesterday I attended a business presentation that made me think. That alone sets it apart from nearly every other presentation that has consumed my time during the past year.

Andrew Keen spoke about his new book, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture." Looking past his world-weary, atheistic and self-loathing British persona, Keen proposed a provocative idea: namely, that Web 2.0's "empty vessel" filled with user-generated content is killing important cultural institutions that create great music, writing, movies and so on.

I agree with his assertion that creativity and talent are relatively rare and that a democratized (or populist) approach to creating content is bound to create rubbish; one need only survey individually produced websites and blogs to realize that giving little Billy the tools to write and publish his thoughts does not make him William Shakespeare. The self esteem and relativist cults notwithstanding, not everyone has a genius inside him or her that is waiting to be liberated.

However, I haven't read his book yet, so I can't speak for his presentation there, but in person I felt he didn't quite do justice to the rest of his subject. Keen's argument on behalf of "professionals" and "the elite" as superior cultural institutions didn't wash with me and put him in the untenable position of defending movie studios and TV networks as suppliers of superior creative products.

I felt his argument would have been stronger had he focused on how the "Cult of the Amateur" is killing the financial underpinnings of today's media when there is no alternative business model in sight. YouTube is fine for distracting silly bits, but will it produce a complex, expensive important film like (insert your movie equivalent of Shakespeare here)?

Free market libertarians charge -- quite rightly, I think -- that Keen doesn't discuss the power of the market much in his book. To me it doesn't seem necessary for his argument: Keen is warning about the impact of Web 2.0 on the media choices available to the market, not the market mechanism for choosing among them.

Parents of young children who are worried about nutrition often comfort themselves with the old saw that kids will eat what they need. The oft-ignored corollary to that truism is that children will only be able to eat properly when they have a selection of good, nutritious foods from which to choose; a child faced with choices that include lots of junk food will make entirely different choices.

So the question is which version of the future can present the best selection of media choices from which to choose: today's professional environment or Web 2.0's nonstop amateur hour? The answer may not be clear but the question certainly is.