Confessions of an Internet iconoclast

I'm the featured bomb-thrower on BBC Radio 4's Iconoclasts show tomorrow night at 8.00 pm. Below is the short speech I will give that outlines my views...

CONFESSIONS OF AN INTERNET ICONOCLAST

It’s not surprising that, as an Internet iconoclast, I’ve been anointed as the Anti Christ of Silicon Valley. The Internet is viewed with such innate religiosity inside Silicon Valley that anyone who dares question its economic, cultural or moral value is inevitably labeled an apostate. And my own apostasy is all the more heretical to insiders because I’ve dared to question the most sacred of all Silicon Valley beliefs – the notion that it is economically, culturally and morally good to have technology that allows all of us to author our own writing, music and movies on the Internet.

This ideal of self-authored Internet content is known as the Web 2.0 revolution.  Websites such as YouTube and MySpace and technologies such as blogs and wikis are supposedly democratizing our culture by allowing anyone to author their own online content. My own apostasy has been to argue that this revolution in self-authored content is bad. Rather than the flowering of democracy, I fear that Web 2.0 is resulting in cultural chaos, economic catastrophe and moral decay.

Now, of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with either self-expression or self-authoring technology, either on or off the Internet. The problem, though, is when Web 2.0 technology is idealized as a way of undermining conventional talent and of replacing the wisdom of traditional experts with the innocence of online amateurs. And that’s exactly how Silicon Valley’s dreamers – who, perhaps not uncoincidentally, own the highly profitable companies that sell the tools to enable this explosion of self-expression – have framed the Web 2.0 revolution.

Their radical democratic dream has, unfortunately, become our collective nightmare. The enormous popularity of Web 2.0 technology has meant that the cult of the amateur has gone mainstream and is now seriously dumbing-down our culture. Today’s Internet is democracy gone wild. There are now billions of free blog diaries, free YouTube videos, free Facebook pages, free flickr photographs, free Wikipedia entries, even free self-authored pornography, but less and less authoritative or beautiful content on the Internet. The web has become a cacophony of unregulated, personalized, often anonymous and generally worthless opinion in which everyone is talking simultaneously but nobody is listening to anyone else. Rather than a democratic utopia of creative amateurs, this self-broadcasting Internet revolution is actually leading to mass ignorance and to a pervasive culture of digital narcissism.

As both a cause and an effect of the rise of this radically democratic Web 2.0 revolution, our traditional meritocracy of proven experts is in crisis. Newspapers are laying off more and more skilled journalists, music labels are shutting down entirely, traditional knowledge workers, book publishers and even librarians are all scrambling to survive in a fast changing economy. It’s the perfect storm for accredited media professionals who have acquired their skills through education, hard work and self-discipline but who are now being marginalized by the Internet’s cult of the amateur author.

The biggest financial problem is that the supposedly new media economy of blogs and YouTube videos isn’t making the content creators much money. That’s because today’s digital technology has made almost all content free, thereby undermining media’s historically successful business model of selling content to consumers. The music industry, for example, has been decimated by an online plague of kleptomania. But it’s not just the Internet thieves who are killing our culture. Even the best blogs, like the Huffington Post, give their content away for free and don’t pay their contributors. The greatest losers, then, in this great cultural transformation are our traditional creative class – professional musicians, journalists, film-makers, photographers and animators -- who are now struggling to monetize their talent in an advertising saturated economy where all the serious cash is being channeled to technology providers like Google, YouTube and MySpace.

Knowledge and truth are both being turned upside down by today’s Internet. Mainstream media was once a place we went to in order to be educated by disinterested experts about an impersonal world outside our immediate experience. But today’s Internet has become an extension of that familiar personal realm, where we go to broadcast ourselves to friends instead of learning from strangers.. Rather than Marshall McLuhan’s dream of a global electronic village, the web is fragmenting society into a billion intimate hamlets, dragging it back into a discordant pre-Enlightenment dark age where all truth is personal and all knowledge local.

So what to do and who to trust? I’m no Luddite and I accept that we can’t rewind back to a pre-digital age. But I’m also opposed to a mindless determinism that treats all technological progress as inevitable and thus good. Human-beings create technology and it lies with us to take responsibility for the consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution. Digital utopians have crowned the“citizen-journalist” as their bereted hero of the insurrection – the Trotsky 2.0 of this brave new digital world. But, rather than the self broadcaster, my hero of the Internet age is the citizen who acknowledges his ignorance about things, who keeps her mouth shut, who uses media to learn about and enjoy the world from other better informed and more talented than themselves.

If such apostasy makes me the anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, then so be it. Somebody needs to tell the truth about today’s interactive Internet. Somebody needs to explain the corrosive economic, cultural and moral consequences of a Web 2.0 world in which beauty, talent and knowledge are all being amateurized by the online mob.

Comments

[Stephen Smoliar]

Andrew, remember that Internet evangelism is just as faith-based as all the specious reasoning coming out of the current White House:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/06/stepping-on-long-tail-again.html

That's why even the Internet advocates are not ashamed to call it "evangelism!" Mind you, a commitment to positivism is also pretty faith-based, particularly when it is the sort of positivism that sustains "Chicago school" economics:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/10/where-milton-fumbled.html

You can rail against the irrationality of faith all you want and even take pride in your own apostasy; but, at the end of the day, most decisions are made to comfort children scared of the dark (whatever that metaphorical "dark" may be)!

[Joe Nutt]

There is one major area of activity you miss out Andrew, which causes me even more concern, education. It is arguable that the entire education system in the west has been usurped in the last decade by techno-zealots whose only interest is in what they inevitably term "cool" technology, and not the least in what children can accomplish with it. I too am no Luddite, but it sometimes horrifies me to hear the nonsensical claims made for technology by techno-zealots who, in reality, are usually using it to make up for their own creative shortcomings. Examine their own online prose and in a matter of minutes you will find fundamental errors which, when I was an English teacher, I would have insisted a sixteen year old correct. That individuals, whose standard of thinking and writing frequently falls short of what we would expect of a competent sixteen year are viewed by governments as educational "thought leaders," is not just depressing, it's shameful.

[Vince Williams]

Haven't the sort of people who care about history, literature, and science always been a minority in the US? I doubt most of our college freshmen would know more than one or two of the line-up in the Philosophers' Match.

Perhaps it's a good thing that the illiterate mob are kept busy at their narcissistic pursuits on the internet-- it keeps them off the streets where they'd make trouble-- no doubt tarting around like Paris Hilton or beating up Russell Brand.

Better to have them generating low-grade media content to divert themselves and their peers in ignorance, at least till we can find a way to revive the spirit of learning and get the masses better educated.

I suggest we emphasize the classics so that every student has heard of Pericles' funeral oration before he graduates high school. I see only a paltry 13,900 English pages of Google results for it (in quotes), and a shocking 17,700,000 for Lindsay Lohan.

On the other hand, we should discard the quaint notion that every future Jane the Plumber needs a bachelor of arts degree, but we must be sure she knows in which century our Revolutionary War was fought and can locate Argentina on the globe.

[Sue Schofield]

Our Man On The Wireless, far from being burned alive at the stake, actually seemed to get, er, a fair crack of the whip on the BBC's Iconoclast radio program last night.

Possibly because we Brits think anyone who stands up for their views deserves a voice, and partly because of the recent odour of burning BBC presenters Ross, and Brand, Ole Brown-Eyes made quite a positive impression last night. The only downside was the strained quality of the audio link from Keen's basement dungeon, which made Our Hero sound a tad nasal.

My cynical chums, journalists, hard-bitten Old Meeja editors, and other ne'er do wells who were forced to listen to the Beebcast, thought Andy earnest, and well-meant, and agreed, mostly, with his sentiments. As did a couple of online respondents.

We all snorted when the phrase 'user-edited encyclopedia' was uttered, and we cheered a bit when Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited, an overly lefty online suppository of 'fact', fluffed a couple of lines. (The Times does it so much better, Emily.)

Thanks Andrew.

And as Moses said, keep taking the tablets.

[Seth Finkelstein]

It's so amusing. It's like you took one of [redacted]'s blog posts or [redacted]'s conference spiels, and simply went through saying the exact opposite.

[Stephen Smoliar]

Joe, you don't have to be a Luddite to bridle (or barf) at a barbarism like "edutainment;" the very coining of the word tells you everything you need to know about your "techno-zealots!"

Vince, for the record I just typed "Hofstadter anti-intellectualism American" into my Google search window. (If you to not know the "target book," it won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.) The hit count was 20,400. That's a bit better than Pericles but still pretty pale compared to Lindsay!

[andykisaragi]

some of these comments are pretty funny. however valid your arguments guys, you're doing a very good job of sounding like old dotards defending entrenched positions - which kind of obfuscates the validity of your arguments.

"Perhaps it's a good thing that the illiterate mob are kept busy at their narcissistic pursuits on the internet-- it keeps them off the streets where they'd make trouble-- no doubt tarting around like Paris Hilton or beating up Russell Brand. " - I love this. basically saying "most people aren't as clever, intellectual and critical as I am" and using a couple of parroted, un-thought-out ideas to say it. "keep them off the streets where they'd make trouble" - so empty streets are safe, busy streets troublesome? this is not even received wisdom any more. But step back from that, are the 'mob' really kept so busy by social media that they don't venture out into the world? sure, this is what my grandmother might well think if i explained it to her but almost anyone who uses social media will tell you otherwise - they are a bolt on to real-world communities and social networks, allowing more connectivity between people and sharing of information.

I am not necessarily saying this is a good thing!!! I happen to _think_ it is, but i think these technologies are yoo young for us to quite understand their transforming effects... But if you're criticising them, in order to get people to listen I think you need to go beyond the no-thought position that the internet and web 2.0 is creating a world of shut-ins, because this does not square with people's own experiences, and so when they hear you they are going to think you're just a bunch of cranks.

[dtr]

The problem that any dumbass may bring his absurd contents to publicity already exists and doesn't need Web 2.0.
Look at this nonsense for example where a person set up as a judge of useful and useless content.
No, not even this person and the pamphlet are reprehensible. It is part of a culture anyone can contribute to in the measure of attention it is able to gain and therefore potentially welcome.
It doesn't really matter that it is rubbish. Most of publications are particularly so called professional content of the media.

[Vince Williams]

Where did you leave your sense of humor, Andy? It was meant to be a joke, dummy.

Of course I'm a crank-- why else would I spend my time writing comments here?;-)

[Richard Nalty]

I regard the Internet as a little like travel - it favours the prepared mind, and the prepared mind only. I use the Internet alongside books, and some highly selective television (much of which is researched on the web). But for some time now I have felt that the Internet (which now pretty much means social networking websites) is helping to dumb down at a quicker rate than Wikipedia can work in the other direction. It is possible to have a little light-hearted fun on Facebook, but for many it merely compounds and reinforces their (chav / underclass / feckless etc.) worldview - and thrusts it centre stage, which has not previously been possible. So it is pseudo-democratizing, but it sidelines what is of any real significance. It revels in the disconnected moment, and the next rush of excitement. Facebook is a window into the overwhelmingly shallow, boorish, incivil culture which has been the norm in England for some time. And if you care to check, I do have an account, and the status remarks indicate a rich mental life and self-reflection. Snootily, the account exists to monitor others and from time to time to transmit my disapproval.

[Clair Dunn]

Andrew --
This calls again to mind my often recurring thought about television: It could have been such a wonderful thing.

Disclosure: I am an IA (Internet Aficionado) and always will be, but I agree with you completely.

Thanks!.
Clair Dunn