Thoughts Occasioned Hearing an Interview with Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen is the author of The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. He is concerned that the Internet is getting people to attend to amateur writers of blogs, wikis and other do-it-yourself media, and undermining the established audience for professional writers, musicians, and experts. He writes:

Instead of developing technology, I believe that our real moral responsibility is to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur. We need to reform rather than revolutionize an information and entertainment economy that, over the last two hundred years, has reinforced American values and made our culture the envy of the world. Once dismantled, I fear that this professional media—with its rich ecosystem of writers, editors, agents, talent scouts, journalists, publishers, musicians, reporters, and actors—can never again be put back together. We destroy it at our peril. So let’s not go down in history as that infamous generation who, intoxicated by the ideal of democratization, killed professional mainstream media.

There are quite negative reviews and analyses of this book by Lawrance Lessig (on his blog) and Dan Gillmor (on the Center for Citizen Media blog). Both these guys are more expert and thoughtful than I am, but I did want to comment as well.

Certainly the Internet is changing the world. Some of the changes are not good. Independent book stores and record shops are closing, unable to survive in a world in which so many books and so much music is obtained online. Newspapers are losing circulation, and deciding often to cut back on their newsrooms as a response to that loss.

Chris Anderson's The Long Tail makes the point that people are reading more from less popular books and listening more to less popular music as a result of being able to find the products on the well stocked shelves of the Internet (when they were not on the modest shelves of the book stores and record shops). The good side of that story is that many meritorious works are getting an audience that would have otherwise gone to less meritorious works from pop culture. The bad side is that there is less of a market for the stars.

Baumol and Bowen identified as "the cost disease" the fact that some services can not be made more efficient. It takes the same number of musicians the same amount of time to play a symphony well as it did 100 or 200 years ago; it takes a team as long to play a baseball game now as it did 100 years ago, and the team is of the same size. The productivity of live performances could not improve, and thus as technological change improves the efficiency of other activities, live performances become relatively more expensive.

On the other hand Sherwin Rosen in "The Economics of Superstars" pointed out that the mass media made recorded or broadcast services cheaper. The cost of a symphony orchestra recording session could be amortized over the sale of a million CDs, and a baseball game could be broadcast to a million TV viewers instead of the audience who would attend a game in person. As a result, the superstar could demand very high fees for performing, while the average performer finds few venues in which to perform (and winds up in another profession).

Of course, the audience has only so much attention. People reading an old classic will not be reading the new best seller; listening to a recording from La Scala keeps one out of the local opera house; watching the game on TV is not really compatible with attending the local minor league game. So the fame and wealth of the media superstar comes at the expense of the audience for the run-of-the-mill performer.

I just went through Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and was reminded how much of leisure time in the past was taken up with games and the arts. I remember when kids used to go play in the streets or the school playgrounds after school, but they seem to stay indoors these days tied to the media. In the middle class in the 19th century, everyone had a parlor act -- singing, playing an instrument, reciting poetry, or even a dramatic reading. Of course the quality of the performance was not what we expect of professionals on TV, but people actually performed. The media-based star system's growth was as marked by the decline of general performance skills as the growth of the automobile industry was marked by the decline of the horse and buggy industry.

I personally am glad to see the Internet creating a world in which people again entertain and inform small groups of their friends and peers with their own amateur writing and performing. If that means that the TV stars will have less audience and less wealth, I can live with that.

Of course, the leisure class was pretty small in Jane Austen's day. For every upper class twit enjoying the season at Bath in 1800, there were a lot of people sweating their short lives out in the mines or mills. Technological progress, including the development of ICT that brought us the media, has increased productivity and people have used that increased productivity not only to buy more goods but to have more leisure, and thus more time to attend to reading and writing, studying, playing and watching others play, making and listening to music.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in the 19th century:

• If you do not use the tools, they use you.
• Things are in the saddle / and ride mankind.

The concept is similar to that in Langdon Winner's book, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought. But a society need not move thoughtlessly in response to technological change. As Noel Perrin has shown in his book, Giving Up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, it is possible with the right leadership for a society to choose the way to use a technology, or even to choose not to use a technology. I think Keen is right in his assertion that innovations in the information infrastructure may have unintended negative consequences, and that we as a society would be well advised to act to assure that expertise survives and prospers, that expert opinion is heard and is influential.

My reading of history, suggests that as information technologies proliferate, they do not fully replace one another. The telephone did not replace the telegraph for a very long time, and radio survived the introduction of television. Books continue to be important in our lives.

Moreover, people are using the increase in labor productivity to allow much more education, and there are many more experts now than in the past. Moreover, information and communications technology advances are increasing the efficiency of experts in information acquisition, analysis and dissemination of their intellectual products. It may be that the unregulated effect of the Internet will not be as destructive to expertise as Keen fears.

Note also that we should not be too complacent about the values of cultural aspects of the 20th century that grew up under the information infrastructure of that time. The star system kept a lot of creative people from reaching any audience as we watched the most commercially successful. (Think of Van Gogh or Vermeer, artists who were completely missed by almost the entire audience in earlier decades.) Mass media often dumbed down content to a level that maximized audience rather than beneficial impact.

And of course, major aspects of 20th century culture were massive lack of education in the world, undue influence of propaganda, and commercialization and commodification of culture. I would not be displeased to see the Internet kill some of these aspects of our culture allowing a more rational and quality oriented aspects of culture to grow in their place.