Lift Up Your Hearts!

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 2007)

It's past time to get this book back to the library; I actually finished it quite a while ago, but have been putting of this post because I haven't known quite what to say.  It's a complex book, probably an important one, but it covers so much territory I'll never do it justice.  The book is far more than a diatribe against amateurism, but I will skip over the sections on Internet gambling, Internet pornography, privacy concerns, and the demise of an iconic record store.  Except for Tower Records—it's hard to mourn the disappearance of something you never knew existed—I'm aware of the other issues and tend to agree that they are, indeed, serious problems.  Whether or not the proliferation of amateur voices is boon or bane is a bit more complex.

Now that I've finished reading the book, I still stand by what I've already said (here, and here), and will add that Keen is right to fear that truth, accuracy, responsibility, and excellence are in danger of being lost in our society, but wrong in laying the blame solely or even primarily on the Internet.

It's true that many people are no longer giving professionals the unquestioned respect, trust, and even obedience they once did. But it is not so much because the Internet lets amateurs speak as because the professionals have proven themselves untrustworthy.

When an article runs under the banner of a respected newspaper, we know that it has been weighted by a team of seasoned editors with years of training, assigned to a qualified reporter, researched, fact-checked, edited, proofread, and backed by a trusted news organization vouching for its truthfulness and accuracy.  Take those filters away, and we, the general public, are faced with the impossible task of sifting through and evaluating an endless sea of the muddled musings of amateurs. 

Most of us assume that the information we take in can be trusted.  But when the information is created by amateurs, it rarely can be.  And the irony in all this is that democratized media wil eventually force all of us to become amateur critics and editiors ourselves. With more and more of the information online unedited, unverified, and unsubstantiated, we will have no choice but to read everything with a skeptical eye.  The free information really isn't free; we all end up paying for it one way or another with the most valuable resource of all—our time.

Anyone who has ever been part of a story reported in a "respected newspaper," magazine, or television news story probably laughed at that first paragraph.  I don't believe any of the many stories I've known first hand has been reported completely accurately, and often the errors are significant.  The need to read everything with a skeptical eye predates the Internet.

It doesn't take much research into factory farming, modern American childbirth practices, the pharmaceutical industry, the politics of university research, the news media, the educational system, and even the music world to realize that professionals are not necessarily good and wise, and often disastrously wrong.  [Keen does not deal with most of these areas directly, but what he says about the amateur vs. the professional applies equally well.]

[E]very free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper.  Every visit to Wikipedia's free information means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica.  Every free music or video upload is one less sale of a CD or DVD, meaning one less royalty for the artist who created it.

I'm not at all sure this is true.  I suspect many things are listed on Craigslist that would never make it into a newspaper's classified section, not just because people sell some really weird things on Craigslist but because I think it, like eBay, inspires people to sell things who otherwise wouldn't have bothered.  I'm certain that if online references such as Wikipedia were not available, it would not drive many people to purchase an encyclopedia; their question would simply go unanswered.  Knowing next to nothing about online music an videos I can't say much about the last thesis, but I do know that the availability of free music samples has helped inform my CD-buying decisions, and that I've bought more CDs than I otherwise would have due to being able to have that data.

I do appreciate the availability of Google News, and free online versions of many newspapers, including our Orlando Sentinel.  But that was not what drove us to cancel our subscription of nearly 20 years.  Rather, it was because the Sentinel itself had become unreliable, with more and more opinion being inserted into the news stories instead of confined to the editorial pages, and with factual, informative articles being cut in favor of insubstantial fluff and large pictures.

Becoming a doctor, a lawyer, a musician, a journalist, or an engineer requires a significant investment of one's life in education and training, countless auditions or entrance and certifying exams, and commitment to a career of hard work and long hours....Can the cult of the noble amateur really expect to bypass all this and do a better job?

There's the rub.  Because Keen is right here:  we need the professionals, the ones who will invest their lives and resources in becoming experts in specialized fields, and if the proliferation of amateur works makes it no longer possible for them to earn a reasonable return on their investment, we may very well lose the infrastructure that makes the expertise possible. 

The amateurs are, however, performing an important function.  In my own field of (amateur) genealogy, I subscribe to the Ancestry.com service.  Some people shun commercial sites and believe all information should be freely shared, but I am happy to pay for the work that their professionals have done to gather and make available a tremendous amount of genealogical data.  There is also a section of the site that has been created by amateurs:  a large database of people's own family trees.  This data is not subject to any editorial supervision, is rarely sourced, and is for the most part highly unreliable. I never cite it as a source in my own work, except in a few cases where I have contacted the author and have reason to trust his or her data.  I treat the personal family trees in a much different fashion from other Ancestry information, such as their images of census transcriptions, old newspapers, and books.  Nonetheless, the amateur data has proven many times to be extremely valuable, giving important clues and sometimes great breakthroughs.  Yes, I always need to verify the information, bur without the "collective wisdom" of all those amateurs my search would have been much harder, if not impossible.

I think Wikipedia, amateur news blogs, and the other non-professional works that Keen decries should be approached in much the same way.  Schools are right not to allow Wikipedia citations for research papers, but that doesn't mean Wikipedia isn't a great resource for getting started.  You'll never get a clear view of the news by reading only a right-wing blog, but it can be a useful balance to your local left-wing newspaper, and vice versa.

But he's right: we do need the experts, and we do need to recognize that some reports are more truthful than others, and some opinions more valuable.  What he doesn't say, but what I believe to be the most effective approach to a solution, is that we all need to be better educated, and better trained in logic and discernment.  Give a man a professional opinion and you'll feed his mind for a day; teach him to discern truth from error and you'll feed his mind for a lifetime.