IT 695 - Week 3

Reading: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

Here's my initial impression of Keen's book: He loved the internet in the beginning. He was a pioneer in the internet music industry and made some money. As long as the internet followed the path of traditional media (one-to-many), it was fantastic. Enter Web 2.0, and suddenly the average person has the ability to not only receive information, but to interact with it and create it. The internet is thus transformed into the herald of our social and cultural doom. In short, he seems to believe the human race is incapable of adapting to this degree of freedom without someone smart to tell us what to think.

I found his "the sky is falling" attitude in the first few chapters of the book to be just annoying. I rarely like to listen to someone tell me repeatedly that things are awful. I'd rather entertain ways to fix problems and, until chapter 8, there was little of that. Keen seemed determine to map our path along the road to ruin, when what I wanted to say to him was, "This is bad, here's my suggestion to make things better." And really, his opinion of web 2.0 - anyone's opinion, really - cannot change what's already happened. The genie is out of the bottle, and instead of crying that we can't stuff it back in, the naysayers should start planning effective wishes.

Most of Keen's major premise just made me shake my head. He spends an incredible amount of time bewailing the average consumer's inability to separate information and entertainment from advertising and propaganda. This kind of made me giggle when you consider that the definition of propaganda, according to the evil Wikipedia, is "the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist." I don't know about Keen's average monkey behind the keyboard, but I can clearly recognize his book as propaganda.

One example of this is his anguish over the closing of Tower Records. Don't get me wrong, I loved Tower Records. But I'm willing to bet that any time a new Tower store opened, there were smaller stores owned by individuals (not huge companies) that went out of business nearby. We used to hear those stories all the time, the small mom-and-pop store falls to the power of the big box seller. So what he viewed as something fantastic, had profound economic effects on some people. The current changes occurring our culture and economy will do the same thing. As it states in the Karl Fisch video, Did You Know, many of my middle school students today will graduate and hold jobs that don’t exist today.

Keen's book got me thinking a lot about evolution. Not only his reference to monkeys (thanks Darwin!), but also sociocultural evolution. The one absolute in our existence is that things change, whether we want them to or not. Things change in ways both good and bad, and our history is full of examples of our ability to adapt. Keen himself identified several ways that we're already doing that with sites like Citizendium and Joost, which may not solve the problems he outlines, but they are certainly a first step.

And as educators, we're already adapting (or should be). When I started working as a media specialist, I was teaching my library classes things like the Dewey Decimal System, how to use an atlas, what to do with a periodical index. Now I don't even introduce those things; instead, I spend the bulk of my class time teaching students to be evaluators of information. Because the problem now isn't how to find information, it's how to be sure the information found is worthwhile.