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"Web 2.0--the folly of amateurs?"
Posted on Friday, April 06, 2007 at 10:47 AM by Jason Barker
Charles Cooper of CNet has a brief review of a book (to be released in June) by Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, in which Keen gives a pessimistic perspective on some of the ways in which the philosophy of "the wisdom of the crowd" that drives a lot of new technology - particularly, as the article's title indicates, Web 2.0 - is increasingly enabling a culture of mediocrity.
Cooper writes:
The subtitle of his book states his thesis bluntly: "How the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture, and our values."
Them be fighting words, to be sure, and Keen is being purposely provocative. But he's worth reading. Keen's not writing from the uninformed point of view of a technophobe. In his previous life, he was the founder of Audiocafe.com. That said, he's not at all happy about where things are headed, bemoaning the advent of "an endless digital forest of mediocrity" as the number of new blogs doubles each six months. Here's a typical snippet:
"If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite, that they've undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can't tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com."
Keen finds little to celebrate in the rising cult of the amateur. Same for the emerging age of citizen journalism, and he frets about the growing influence of short-form bloggers at the expense of the wisdom of long-form essays of scholars and experts. He worries about the wisdom-of-the-crowd phenomena represented by the likes of Wikipedia or YouTube and the impact they're having on an ADD-prone generation that embraces editor-free news sites. Technology is our friend? Don't kid yourself, is Keen's response. The crowd has often proved itself to be anything but wise. We may have strong opinions but so many of us remain uninformed.
It is true, as Cooper later says, that technology is generally morally neutral, and there are many positive things that can be said about the Internet: I've written about the efficacy of multimedia study tools, as well as the fact that publishing on the Web enables us to reach a world-wide audience in a cost-effective manner. At the same time, Keen's general point can be easily applied to online Bible studies: the fact that someone CAN publish his or her opinions - however uninformed - about the Bible does not mean that a person SHOULD publish these opinions. This fact can be easily demonstrated by visiting any number of online Bible studies - and particularly open-forum discussions - where preposterous opinions are put forth, with the writer expecting that this opinion not only be accepted as readily as the teaching of someone who has knowledge about the subject, but frequently that the writer's opinion REPLACE the teaching of the expert.
This problem can be even greater in Bible studies for youth because, as I've quoted elsewhere, teens generally are inhibited "in terms of their cognitive and emotional development, life experiences, and familiarity with the media apparatus." They therefore need guides in such online learning as Bible studies. It is for this reason that, while I hope to develop ways to increase interactivity in these Bible studies, the basic approach will remain one - for lack of a better summary - of teacher and student (both myself as a teacher through my writing, as well as the teachers and youth workers with whom the youth interact in their local parishes). Discussion must be allowed - and even encouraged - but it must be done within the context of knowing that there is absolute truth, and that there are authority figures who are more knowledgable and experienced in dealing with this truth than teens or newcomers to Orthodoxy.
This applies to me as much as it does to any teenager: I - like most Orthodox writers and teachers - have undergone years of education, and continue to study and keep current on scholarship, and I further always try to ensure that my opinions and writings are in accordance with the Tradition of the Church. Still more, my teachers have done the same thing. It is this faithfulness to the Tradition of the Church, combined with rigorous and ongoing education, that makes our teaching relevant, and ensures that what we write does not simply become another ill-formed shoot in the "endless digital forest of mediocrity."
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