Not so keen on Keen

It is going to be a long, unpleasant slog through Andrew Keen, but I'm bound and determined to make it. First of all, and really this is a sort of off-topic rant that deals not so much with the book's message as its delivery, but... this book is worthless as a treatise. If you already agree with it, you already agree with it, but it's so loaded with hyperbole and invective that anyone who isn't already agreeing at the outset is likely to be put off by it. So in that sense, this book probably isn't going to change much of anything for anybody's perspective. Sort of defeats the purpose of writing a "hard-hitting polemic" (see the liner notes) - this is really more spiritually akin to O'Reilly or Hannity or something, more heat than light.

On to the points themselves.

This great democratization of content means "we will have no choice but to read everything with a skeptical eye." (Keen, 46) How terrible! Surely we can only blame Web 2.0 for forcing us to think critically, that concept that's ostensibly at the heart of every liberal arts education there is. See, my fault there. Keen's tone just elicits a sort of tit-for-tat response from me. I'll try to avoid it, but...

Another tidbit that jumped out at me: Keen notes that the economist Adam Smith thought specialization was just the cat's meow (Keen, 38). The first thing that came to mind on reading that was Heinlein, "Specialization is for insects." (quote available now on more than 50,000 web pages near you)

Not that one position or the other is necessarily "correct". You can place whatever sort of value on specialization that you want. What it means to you is what it means, and really, that's the entire point at issue here. Keen thus far just strikes me as someone absolutely terrified of the prospect of populism turned loose by the communication afforded by the Internet. He's firmly camped out in the notion that people need to be told what's important to think about by an enlightened oligarchy. If we're left to our own collective, amateur resources, we might get it wrong. "It", by the way, is a wholly subjective qualitative valuation, in a lot of cases... is this good music, or is it junk? How can I ever tell, there's so much of it now! In KeenWorld, we apparently need experts to tell us what quality is, even within the context of our own personal consumption of information.

Keen makes this bizarre leap of logic, too. If suddenly now everyone's able to create and post content, then it somehow follows that not only will it make it a lot more difficult to find something of "quality", but we'll also lose our ability to differentiate between good and bad. It's like he's clinging to authoritarianism... you need to be listening to Bob Dylan because I said so and I'm an acclaimed critic and I got published in Rolling Stone once, not because you yourself think it's worth listening to.

Keen mentions a couple magazines' person of the year: YOU! Well, Keen doesn't particularly like YOU!

Anyway, on with the reading. This one's going to be a treat.

One little edit: There's an argument being made here by Keen, that in all honesty is probably worth some discussion. He just has a particular talent for ruining his own message. Are there other proponents of his line of thinking? If I want to read about how the Internet totally fails to cull the wheat from the chaff, and requires me to do that on my own, who else can I read?