the web giveth

So, today, on BoingBoing (which I read through the Google Reader rss application), Clay Shirkey, a blogger at Corante (which also hosts one of my favorite blogs, Copyfight), called this guy Andrew Keen, whom I had never heard of, a Luddite. Well, kind of. He accused him of having Luddite views.

So now I'm researching Mr. Keen. He wrote a book, which came out last month, called "The Cult of the Amateur." From the reviews I've read, notably, this one in The Sunday Times, Keen basically says that the Internet is adept at flooding the intellectual market with low-quality information and entertainment. He likens it to the idea of monkeys on typewriters, but there's no chance of even the infinite number of monkeys out there creating anything brilliant. He argues that the old media did a good job of picking out what was good or important and making it popular.

Shirkey says Keen's argument is Luddite because Keen isn't anti-technology, he's anti-technology-replacing-the-way-we-used-to-do-things. This is Luddite because, well, it's what the Luddites thought. Shirkey explains that in 1811, a group of weavers broke mechanical looms. Their issue was that these new mechanical weaving looms made it cheaper to make fabric, which hurt their profits. They were counter-revolutionaries. Of course, we all know what happened to the weaving industry, as I'm sure nothing I'm wearing right now was woven by hand.

So far, the most interesting idea for me is this bit from the Sunday Times' review:

Even if they had the talent and the connections, no blogs could afford to conduct investigations comparable to the great newspaper campaigns of the past. So the idea that content on the web is “free” is mistaken: the hidden cost may be the demise of old media and entire art forms on which the free content depends.

Not to toot my own horn, but earlier in this blog, I mentioned that possibly, we were paying the price of humanity by using the Internet for simple tasks. Are we willing to pay these prices? I need to read Keen's book and get back to you. Hopefully, I can get it from the local public library today.