The august Financial Times has reviewed a recently published small and virulent tome on how the ‘new world’ of communication — in particular Web2.0 with its Facebooks and MySpace and YouTube and blogs and podcasts — is leading to the decline of civilisation as we know it.
The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen, is seemingly bent on destroying the ethic-less and inane contributions of Joe Average in order that sanity and good public order are restored.
Richard Waters, the FT journalist, has a fantastic way of summing up:
“Keen’s argument comes down to two linked issues. One is social. To the extent that we watch YouTube or read blogs, we are turning our backs on expertise, learning, professionalism.
“This is an elitist argument that is too deferential to the “professional” media world and insufficiently respectful of the audience’s right to choose and its ability to sort the good from the bad.”
Keen feels that we have killed off traditional media and academic fact and data gathering and in its place dumped the inane, the unerudite and the un-(fact)-checked. Says Waters,
“As he sees it, anything of value online is being buried under mountains of user-generated garbage, and it is hard to find or identify the stuff with true worth.”
Which is why Google has introduced its LSI algorithms (Latent Semantic Index), to go much further than before (“to boldly go where no search engine has indexed before”) in sorting out the wheat from the chaff on our behalf and save us considerable time and head-space in the process.
All in all a great review of a book that is important to read, if only because it shows how far down the road we have come on our travels towards democratic right to free speech, the right to congregate and the right to bear arms (verbal arms, that is. There is a jolly good reason why some bloggers are known as the ‘Pajamahadeen’).
