When cultural commentary turns its gaze to online technologies, it grows dated in the blink of an eye. It’s like watching Joan Rivers and the accelerating pace of her plastic surgeries. The minute one thing gets tacked in place, something else droops. The author of the commentary either has to perform periodic updates to hold up the droopy arguments, or the author has to let go, knowing that their work will end up on a great garbage heap of theorizing and speculation which, if they’re lucky, will one day pique the curiosity of future anthropologists and historians. It’s seven years since Andrew Keen published The Cult of the Amateur and already I feel like such an anthropologist. How fast the world turns. He offered an update in 2008 with a forward and additional chapter, but, so far as I’m aware, there are no more updates; he’s moved on to other books.
The Cult of the Amateur is an expression of cultural conservatism, and one can see this from the book’s tagline: “how blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values”. The tagline is not tacked to the book’s cover just to make it appear controversial so that it can sell a lot of copies; the book really does make the claims that appear in its tagline. This is an instance of truth in advertising.
While the reference to MySpace seems quaint, and the book includes only passing reference to Facebook, these are mere surface details that should not distract the reader. The claims still hold even though the online environment has changed since the book first appeared. Although I identify as something other than a cultural conservative, I acknowledge the legitimacy of many of Keen’s concerns. The online universe really is a sea of factually useless crap. Most bloggers really are self-absorbed whiners. Public discourse really has been eroded, especially (and ironically) in the comments sections of online newspapers. Digital media really are undermining the economic viability of traditional forms while creatives really do struggle to eke out compensation for their efforts.
It’s important to note that many of Keen’s complaints are not the exclusive property of cultural conservatives. Brian Fawcett, who identifies himself as something other than a cultural conservative, made similar complaints four years before Keen. In “Specificity”, the first essay of his book, Local Matters, he writes about the kind of blog he sought to produce:
Not the self-expressive “blog” writing that currently fills Internet sites, where writers mount websites so they can run on, stream-of-consciousness style, about whatever happens to be passing through their heads. Usually, it seems to me, what they write about is what they can see of their navels, or comes with so little structure and attention to research that it is virtually useless except to confirm already-held prejudices.
\r\nWhat distinguishes these two writers is not the complaint but the response. Fawcett didn’t like the quality and tone of online writing, so, with a few of his friends, he created an online space where he could write with the quality and tone he felt was missing elsewhere. He responded by offering himself as an example.
Keen offers a different response. He cries (keens?) like a prophet in the desert of online chaos, calling for a return to a better time when there were professional standards. Articles and stories didn’t get published unless they were vetted by copy-editors and fact-checkers and by editors who ensured that the writing conformed to the house style. Reportage had to conform to ethical standards; confidential sources had to know that their identity would be protected. Musicians couldn’t get airplay for their songs unless they bribed DJ’s with baggies of coke had well-produced tracks and used appropriate marketing channels to deliver their products. People had to watch their stupid dog tricks on David Letterman via network TV instead of watching phonecam videos from some guy no one’s ever heard of who posts it to YouTube. Professionalism!
At least in his call for professionalism, Keen avoids the practices of fellow cultural conservative, Mark Helprin. In Digital Barbarism, Helprin takes time out from decrying the state of the online union to let his politics show. Like the proverbial plumber, he bends over and we can’t help but see his crack. To Helprin, online chaos is symptomatic of deeper social issues that relate to the erosion of private property and individual liberty. He exercises his liberty to riff on elites, higher education, abortion, and same-sex marriage.[1] It produces the impression of a bitter plumber in the twilight of his career who rants about all the shit he’s had to wade through as he unclogs drains and fixes pipes.
However, like Helprin, Keen turns to a discussion of copyright law. The threat of online chaos is a disaster (à la Naomi Klein) that demands the healing hand of capital markets to make everything right again. Shore up proprietary interests in digital content, enforce it with a vengeance to bring users in line, and then … well … make lots of money.
There’s a sense in which Keen’s book is unnecessary. Capitalism is taking care of the problem. In subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle ways, amateurs like me are feeling the squeeze. I don’t suffer from paranoia. I don’t believe there’s a conspiracy afoot to silence me and my fellow bloggers. This is simply the way the world we’ve constructed works. Google, whose market cap at this minute is $US 376.42B, is the world’s primary search engine. Without it, most people would never find me online. But as a lone blogger, I have no idea how its secret search algorithm works. So I can’t game things to draw more traffic to my site. Even those parameters that are obvious, like frequent posting, exclude me because I’m just one guy and there are times when I have to go to the dentist or the therapist, or get drunk, or whatever—important things that keep me from posting on a frequent and regular basis. Blogging aggregators are an answer to this. The Huffington Post used to be a kind of blogging aggretaor, packaging the unpaid work of more than 6,000 bloggers into an online news service that it then sold for US$ 315,000,000 to AOL whose market cap at this minute is $US 3.367B. Then there’s Facebook, whose market cap at this minute is $US 148.37B. Elsewhere, I’ve ranted about how Facebook does to blogging what WalMart does to the main street of any small town.
I could go on, but I’m sure you’ve noticed a pattern. There’s lots of capital working the internets. It’s besides the point whether online content is produced by professionals or amateurs, whether it promotes vital public discourse or encourages Rob Ford to think he’s the greatest civic leader in the history of our species. All that matters is that the content sells advertising. I don’t let my content sell advertising, so I guess I’m not pulling my weight. Well fuck me.
An issue that gets buried beneath the amateur/professional debate is the tension between the local and the global. Much of the cultural expression that Keen derides as amateur takes its character not from the fact that it lacks approval by professional gatekeepers but from the fact that it uses local conventions to give form to local concerns. It’s granular. Rough around the edges. An internet mediated by global interests, like Google, AOL, and Facebook, has no use for expressions that are granular and rough around the edges.
I’m not sure why this is. Why the need for global concerns to erase the local? This erasure is something Brian Fawcett documents in “Specificity” and at greater length in his book, Public Eye: An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World. He celebrates the local. He laments its disappearance. He calls people to rediscover its value. But he’s a little fuzzier on the question of why this is happening.
The most obvious reason is economic. It’s more efficient—isn’t that the word that gets trotted out as if its value were self-evident?—to pretend the world is flat and smooth. Why not package content and deliver the same package a million times to a million different consumers without regard for their million different local contexts? A tailored suit is more expensive; cheaper to buy off the rack. But we’re in dialogue with cultural conservatives, not fiscal conservatives.
The economic rationale is secondary. The global access of online media allows us to do something that looks a lot like eavesdropping. We listen in on local conversations but they sound to our ears like inside jokes. We can’t follow the set-up. We miss the punchline. No one gets them except those who share the teller’s time and place. We get annoyed at our exclusion from their circle, so we call them names. They’re hokey or folksy or out-of-touch. We polished moderns have no patience for grandpa whittling on the porch or aunt Maisie plunking on the piano.
Yet I can’t think of any reason for such scorn except a fear of what we might see if we gaze too long upon the face of local expression. Like Hamlet’s theory of art, local culture might be a mirror held to our nature that reveals to us things we’d rather not acknowledge. Like the banality of our sentiments. Like the ordinariness of our lives. Like the simple desires that make us human.
[1] “In the decline of ethics, knowledge, and civility, and the wilting of restraint and deliberation, much has been carried too far.
“It begins, as is often the case, with elites freed of the normally astringent necessities such as the struggle to make a living, surviving war and other forms of violence, and the need carefully to husband resources. Thus untethered in a world of gas, they propagate and accept peculiar doctrines without limit. At prestigious institutions, celebrated professors opine that newborns, being almost insensible, have a lesser right to life than, say, a celebrated professor at a prestigious institution, and that, therefore, their murder should be “understood” or even accepted as a right of the parent. Social theorists who have spent the last half century relentlessly attacking marriage have suddenly reversed course with the advent of legalized homosexual union.”
Helprin even takes time out to deride the growing use of the word “partner” to indicate lasting relationships which may or may not involve (straight) marriage. I can’t find the reference. But what the hell. I’m only a blogger, part of an anti-democratic libertarian hoard that’s under no duty to fact check.