This video, part of the Authors@Google series, shows Andrew Keen, author of “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture,” discussing his critique of Web 2.0 culture. Here’s a quote from the portion in which Keen identifies his arguments in favor of traditional “gatekeepers” of media:
“I don’t talk about the Italian sociologist Pareto in the book, but Pareto talks about an 80/20 rule. And I think I’m a follower of Pareto, in the sense that all systems tend to be dominated by 20% of the people who shape 80% of the content. I think that much is true for Web 2.0 as it is true for traditional media. Only the new elite are anonymous. The new elites are the kids, the 20-somethings, who are shaping so-called wisdom of the crowd sites like Reddit and Digg.”
He points out that anonymity stifles any accountability to fact or even taste, and as it is such a primary ethic of contemporary web culture, keeps web content from being trustworthy or valuable. At one point, he compared bloggers with traditional journalists (particularly those at large publications like the New York Times or Washington Post) purely on the basis of resources, noting that the larger organizations have the means to fund travel, editors, producers, creative production people, and fact checkers to collaborate with writers to make the end product vastly better than what the average blogger can produce on their own. Regardless of any moral distinction, the resource point is hard to argue with…
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