The Web: enough already? - 2 comments

I'm getting increasingly irritated by articles attacking the political blogosphere (yes, blogosphere) - having covered the issue here already - online communities (e.g. Facebook), and user-generated content (e.g. the Wikipedia, and other Wikis).

Today's Observer has the latest: "Enough! The Briton who is challenging the web's endless cacophony":

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

I've never heard of him, but he has a book out in June (what do you expect from a Sunday newspaper?), and appeals to authority (thanks, Wikipedia!) are just so tempting.

Keen, who still lives in California and works in technology, questions the euphoria surrounding the rise of citizen journalism, online communities such as MySpace and user-generated websites including online encyclopedia Wikipedia and video-sharing site YouTube.

First problem: he questions the euphoria. OK, I quite like the technologies mentioned, but I don't express euphoria, and have been easily able to avoid those journalists who promote it, so how about we agree to drop all mentions of euphoria and stick to how the sites are actually used, day-to-day?

Keen has been praised for applying the brakes to what seems to have become a runaway train: the idea that anyone can use technology to gain control of the media and change the world.

Runaway trains, massive influxes, rising tides... they're everywhere, nowadays.

On his own blog last week, Keen noted growing support for his views: 'It's game on. Now the fun begins.' Oliver Kamm, an author and columnist, has accused bloggers of 'poisoning debate'.

This is so, but Kamm's opener and response were cut to pieces by some of the best political bloggers around (e.g. here and here), and the remains danced-upon with hobnailed boots at Normblog:

Oliver picks me up at one point for comparing blog discussion with the public meeting, when his own comparative reference point is the press and broadcasting media; he's judging blogging as a form of citizen journalism. But blogging is sui generis. It may be like citizen journalism in some ways; yet blogs and their audiences can also be seen as micro-communities of bloggers, readers and discussants, virtual segments of the public square in which voluntarily formed collectives, with participants free to come and go, consider issues that they want to consider. What can 'overproduction of opinion' mean in this context? Should all these people stop writing and reading and commenting unless they have been certified as competent? The complaint of overproduction of opinion doesn't sit well with the theme of freedom of opinion, or with the rights of members of a democratic society to assemble as they wish for legitimate common purposes.

And no one is forced to be a consumer.

As no response has appeared, I consider that to be the end of that particular debate.

Keen's interview continues:

As the internet grows, so do reports of faked identities and stalking on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, deliberately misleading entries on Wikipedia, virtual vandalism in online world Second Life and accusations that YouTube is a forum for either copyright infringement or mind-numbing videos of skateboarding cats. Critics believe the trends may have reached their logical, horrific conclusion last month when Kevin Whitrick, a father-of-two from Shropshire, hanged himself in front of his webcam watched live by members of an internet chatroom.

Sensationalist drivel. Anyone old enough to have been internet-savvy ten years ago - or longer - will recognise the same themes, and the same scaremongering. Everything listed above could have - and has been - done before online, albeit in perhaps a cruder and less visually exciting form. All that's changed is that a journalist has decided to spin things the other way for a change: perhaps someone with a book to promote, or an identity to find.

Keen, 47, presents a dystopian vision in which people endlessly Google themselves and expertise counts for nothing; online communities gather merely to confirm their own prejudices; internet television purports to showcase amateur talent but is dominated by corporate marketing; newspapers are driven to the wall by online advertising and news sites edited at the whimsical click of a mouse; and knowledge of history and literature becomes smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers.

I wonder if it's significant that Keen's age makes its first appearance here, in what could so easily be a rant about "the state of modern music". Ultimately it shows a detachment with the human race: an assumption that the masses click "whimsically", and that the deep appreciation of history and literature developed during their school years will dissipate as they helplessly click from one teenager's blog to another, imbibing the self-obsessedness of each.

Maybe Keen would like to differentiate between the Bloggers4Labour Facebook group and a real-life Labour branch, because if he can spot some kind of essential difference, I can't. Perhaps one the one hand we both "confirm our own prejudices". On the other, perhaps we talk about things and change our minds, in a rather human way, and would swiftly tire and go elsewhere if we couldn't. It's a thought, isn't it?

He continued: 'I'm nostalgic for the world I grew up in where there was a clear distinction between author and audience. I'm not attracted or impressed by the idea of collapsing that distinction. It's hard to be good at what you're doing, it requires expertise. In the same way that not everyone should be doctors or teachers or astronauts, not everyone should be an author. Most people do not have anything interesting to say.'

Well, we have technical qualifications so that people who fancy having a go at being a doctor can be assessed on their competency before killing their first patient, but except insofar as other members of the public put themselves in their hands, people should try different jobs and roles in order that they can be publicly assessed on their competency. Writing - in a democratic, pluralist society - is a public good. It should be encouraged, and anyone arrogant enough to say that "most people do not have anything interesting to say" should try living in solitary confinement for a week or so.

Blogging provides an easy way for anyone to publish their ideas, and just as easy a way for people to judge them. Anyone concerned that those with talent and expertise are failing to get the attention they deserve should consider the huge head, and enormously long tail that blog traffic demonstrates.

Keen criticises Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia for making it impossible to discern the important from the trivial. 'Wikipedia is going to become the internet,' he said. 'It does away with the distinction between the distinguished and the ordinary and becomes a bizarre compendium of information. The absence of editors means there's no way of determining whether something is important, so you get a longer entry for Pamela Anderson than Emmeline Pankhurst. I want to learn about Martin Luther's epiphany, not the epiphany of the 11-year-old who blogs next door.

What kind of person judges the importance of an article based upon its size, or popularity? Anyone who reads the Pankhurst article will quickly realise she was a key figure in the struggle for the enfranchisement of women - a matter of concern across the world - and be directed to articles that will allow them to continue their research. Anyone happening upon the Pamela Anderson article will realise that she has played, at best, a bit-part in the major struggles of the past century, and has limited relevance to the downtrodden of the Earth, if that's how you judge "importance". Encyclopaedias cannot teach you what is important: you have to bring that with you, and if you don't have a clue, you can hardly blame the Web for taking you off down blind alleys.

As far as I'm concerned, the Web is sufficiently large, diverse, and democratic to meet the objections of Keen and others. People are smart enough to ration their own intake of trivia and escapism; curious and intelligent enough not to accept everything they read as fact; sufficiently averse to online abuse to try to push it off their own sites and contain it elsewhere; while editors who manage repositories of information are generally sensible enough to preserve its honesty and integrity. Until someone can show me that these are not generally true on the Web (or significantly less true there than off-line), I'm going to continue trying to make the most of all these new opportunities.

Update (30/04): Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also has a pop at the blogosphere (via The Daily Ablution). You can probably imagine all too well how it goes, and sure enough, it takes Keen's piece and adds the hysteria of a Daily Mail reader who hears a crash and finds an asylum-seeker's football in their kitchen sink. It's completely and utterly awful.

Humanitarian Intervention post-Iraq - no comments

At a meeting on Monday 30th April (sorry, short notice) in the Jubilee Room, Westminster Hall, Houses of Parliament, "a panel of leading Ministers, MPs, and thinkers" will come together to discuss the future of humanitarian intervention, after the conflict in Iraq.

The speakers include:

• Rt. Hon. Hilary Benn MP, Minister for International Development and a candidate for the Labour party deputy leadership.
• Prof. Brian Brivati, Professor of Contemporary History and Human Rights at Kingston University.
• Nick Cohen, journalist for the Observer and New Statesman, and author of ‘What’s Left? How Liberals lost their way’.
• Gary Kent, Director of Labour Friends of Iraq.
• Pat McFadden MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Cabinet Office
• Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust (tbc.)

Apparently, the meeting will be broadcast on YouTube. You can download full details here. I'll get back to you with a start and and end time for the event.