The Cult of the Amateur

The Cult of the Amateur

HBR

Posted by Larry Prusak on May 24, 2007 5:07 PM

There is a battle looming between the techno-utopians and the defenders of traditional forms of cognitive authority. The battle is being waged here and there, in print, on the web, in various forums around the world. This battle represents only the tip of a much larger iceberg: How will the world look and be organized when much of the codified available information in the world is freely available to everyone at little or no cost, and anyone can create yet more information at will?

Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Ameteur adds an interesting polemic to this fight. The book's subtitle, How today's Internet is killing our culture, gives a strong taste of what he is up to. He bemoans the apparent decline of the traditional sources of cognitive authority and worries how these sources can be replaced by such democratic vehicles as the ubiquitous Wikipedia.

This book is fun to read. Is it correct? Well, yes and no. Let me give you some examples. He mentions Walter Cronkite as the sort of source one used to get ones news from: trusted, avuncular, with a strong TV news organization behind him. However Walter never mentioned on the air what he knew about some of the dangerous habits of John Kennedy. He never would have done so. Similarly, The New York Times did not much report on the Holocaust for all sorts of crazy reasons. One could easily go on. Had I.F. Stone lived in the same era as the Internet, many rash and awful things done by our government would have been exposed. On the other hand, without these sources of official opinion, who will have the resources to go to Iraq and see what is going on firsthand? How will investors fare if The Wall Street Journal becomes more "democratized" under Rupert Murdoch? Will the reporters there have the resources as well as the will to uncover another Enron, as they so valiantly did a few years back?

We can't put the genie back into the lamp. Technologies can't run backwards. We have the web, and it is used for whatever purposes people want to use it for. Short of outlawing things(gambling, child porn), it's hard to see how to stop the immense wave of blogs, nonsense, falsehoods, and all else that clutter up what was once a medium for scientists to share working papers. I agree with Keen about some things, but I can't see what can be done about it, except educate people about the differences between information -- which can be sent around the world at the click of a mouse -- and knowledge, which has a natural cognitive stature and is quite expensive to develop and transfer. Who knows how this story will end?