Keen's Diffusion Fallacy
Andrew Keen is a snob.
Perhaps in a good way, but that's the point 
of The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy
Me: The rate of technology diffusion nearly always outpaces the rate of knowledge and cultural diffusion.
Books and the skills of writing and reading were concentrated in the hands of a few people who devoted their lives to religious institutions.
The printing press and public education changed that. Even little children could read and write, without becoming monks and taking vows of poverty and chastity (sorry, Keen). Most of the values and the hard won skills of the old technologists, like page illumination, were abandoned in favor of the minimal skills needed to use the new, disruptive technology.
60 years' ago there were about 44 thousand TV sets in the US (the 1947 DuMont Chatham pictured left). There were maybe a hundred television cameras, literally one in a million people were behind the camera. 
1947 saw the introduction of kinescopes (picture on the right), which recorded television to film, the first time-shifting technology for television (think TiVo). A handful of television stations served major cities a few hours each week.
Commercialized technologies embed values in their designs.
In 2007, millions of television studios will be sold each month, most of them fitting in your pocket. You can shoot and store videos in your mobile phone, distribute them to a billion people. For lunch money.
When you whip out your phone to vid a party, you didn't have to study electronics, optics, signal analysis, camera sensor tuning, video composition, studio lighting, makeup for television, studio mixing, audio engineering, or dozens of other specialties that were first the province of lab rats, then union artists.
Nokia and other phone makers build these skills into phone chips and software. Click to turn on the video camera. Click to shooting. Point. Click to stop and preview. Click to upload. Done. Years of education and experience, careful rites of passage into clubs of skilled craftsmen, reduced to fewer than a dozen button clicks.
Keen whines that the unwashed masses who write, take photos, and shoot video (in other words: think, observe, opine, and share) are destroying the rarified institutions associated with artificial scarcity of the press, literature, the cinema, and academe. That you cannot find the good stuff for all the amateur swill. That all the wisdom of centuries, carefully filtered, tested and cultivated, fails to propagate along with the "democratizing" technologies now available to the poor, illiterate, and stupid.
Duh.
Of course.
And that's OK.
We'll get over it.
We live in a dynamic system. Feedback loops and all. So not only will the old institutions live on - albeit differently - but more people will discover that knowledge, those values, and embrace them. Thousands of people read or saw Shakespeare 400 years' ago vs. hundreds of millions today.
The very mechanisms you decry are the ones that will preserve and reinvigorate those cultural and economic elements you prize, Andrew.
Have faith.
Notes:
- The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death is in April 2016.
- The Klingon Hamlet.
- The Keen Reader.
- TVhistory.tv
skype
Comments
I think Andrew Keen and his "expert" opinion is best ignored. This is the man who compared the goals of Web 2.0 with communism.
I'm guessing that same post will give a good summary of Keen's book, containg such gems as "Taste resides with an elite of cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art". I was never aware that the general public asked for a small group of self-appointed "elites" to tell them what was tasteful and what was not.
Somehow, I doubt his true goal is "the saving of the internet" - it's the saving of an obsolete cultural "elite", who were only ever elite in their own minds. All they really had was a monopoly access to media, a monopoly which has now been shattered. "Cult Of The Amateur" is their dying scream.
Posted by: Scot | June 25, 2007 02:27 AM
Hi! I can't post messagte here...
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Posted by: Haittersinign | December 12, 2007 08:42 AM