After reading the New York Times review of The Cult of the Amateur, I now have the opinion of Andrew Keen as an insufferable, priggish, elitist, schoolmarm. The Cult of the Amateur is, in fact, a very good sign to us new media types because it means that the “carriers of the cultural torch” are bloody well scared.
They’re not sad, indignant, disappointed, or even frustrated. This is the rarefied fear of those who are sure they’re being made redundant soon. Their mastery, specialty, and interest is no longer relevant.
Don’t tell Mr. Keen because he doesn’t know any of this consciously. Andrew Keen is still in denial and still believes that culture will indeed eventually find its way back out of the ivory tower and into mainstream society.
It won’t. Pop culture has never been reflected in the peach pages of the Financial Times or the sticky pages of the New Yorker. All the content on the Internet, the Blogosphere, and inert Web 2.0 platforms have been around since the 50s; however, until recently, the mediasphere wasn’t flat, wasn’t horizontal. The media wasn’t a free market, it was a global, intentional, civics lesson from the elite for the benefit of the common man, whatever that is. I think it may be a secret code for “masses of fucking morons with sixth grade education who chew tobacco” but I am not certain.
Until the Internet, the media elite took it upon themselves to be stewards of us, the “normal folks.” It was their holy responsibility to train us up, to deliver us our culture the way many take the Host on Sunday. It didn’t need to be attractive, it didn’t need to be delicious, and it didn’t need to include a relationship, but it was fortifying. It was the responsibility of High Culture to help us pick ourselves up.
If you’re vulnerable to being insulted, you can even call what they were doing noblesse oblige. Vraiment!
noblesse oblige – a moral economy wherein privilege must be balanced by duty towards those who lack such privilege or who cannot perform such duty
Andrew Keen and his ilk need a wake-up call. Why? Well, because he doesn’t realize that in the horrible reflection, as described in his book “The Cult of the Amateur,†he is seeing in Web 2.0 of America is actually crystal clear.
While his subtitle states that “today’s Internet is killing our culture,” I argue that the Internet — and Web 2.0 especially — is actually reflecting our native American culture (the way we act when at home alone) instead of the false airs we put on when guests are over.
Keen doesn’t like what he sees. So, instead of blaming public education, television, the news media, or parenting, he blames something that is intentionally agnostic, that does its best to act as a catalyst and then get out of the way. Again, a mirror.
Schoolmarms like Andrew Keen have always existed. In recent history, tabloids, private radio, and commercial television, blockbuster cinema, rap music, and video games have all been blamed for “killing our culture;” in more distant history, the same was said about the printing press, Newtonian physics, Jazz, racial integration, Rock and Roll, etc…
Talk Radio is America. Reality TV is America. MySpace is America. Born Again is America. Creationism is America. Wal-Mart is America. NASCAR is America. Pornography and gambling is America. Vegas and Texas and Florida is America; NYC, DC and SFO are like those folks who are embarrassed/ashamed by where/who they’re from.
If we want to “fix” citizen journalism we first have to fix the department of education and parenting! Until you make the Western Canon, Classicism, Poetry, Philosophy, History, Traveling, and a Liberal Education more attractive and relevant than money, then you will never be able to do much more than making sure that your kids and your schools continue to value and teach Classic Greek, Latin, and French instead of Spanish.
There will always be people who are attracted to design, to architecture, to history, to the sciences, to medicine, to foreign affairs, and to art, poetry, and philosophy.
Things aren’t getting worse for us intellectuals, we’re just getting a better idea as to how bad they have become by looking deeply into the mirror of Web 2.0.
Don’t worry. As I told a class of graduate history students at American University, “as long as Colleges and Universities can convince enough rich parents that there is value in spending the price of a car-per-year for their children to learn History, there will always be a place for you in Academia.
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