In early 2006, Andrew Keen published a polemic in the Weekly Standard in which he argued that Web 2.0 was taking us down a dangerous cultural path. He was troubled about the development of new Internet-based technologies that allowed just about anyone with a computer to be able to “to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music….to become an author, a film director, or a musician.” He warned of the dire consequences in which a world of millions of blogs would crowd out the informed expertise of the “elite mainstream media.”
According to Keen, the new opportunities for writing and creating that the Internet opens up eerily recall “Marx’s seductive promise about individual self-realization in his German Ideology” [sic]:*
“Whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” †
This — the cultural division of labor in capitalist society — is a matter that has long been of interest to anthropologists, at least since Edward Sapir published his riff on Marx and Engels in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” in 1924 with a comparison of the empty existence of the “telephone girl” versus the more fulfilling life of the salmon-fishing “American Indian.”
First: what is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia the term was coined by the O’Reilly Media Group in 2003 (and for a hearty guffaw of irony, read this post and the first comment about O’Reilly’s proprietary claim to the term for a technology that is meant to embody open access and an era of new intellectual property law). The NY Times defines Web 2.0 as an era of Internet technology “distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing” and which its proponents argue “ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees.” (Check out anthropologist Michael Wesch’s brilliant anthropology-inflected explanation of Web 2.0 on YouTube.)
But, according to Keen, this “fantasy” is really leading to narcissism and is “inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts.” Rather than a utopia of democracy and self-expression, Web 2.0 is leading to nothing but “the flat noise of opinion–Socrates’s nightmare.”
This past week the New York Times reviewed Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur, which extends the argument of his original essay, with reviewer Michiko Kakutani seeming to side with Keen on the problems with “a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.” It’s hard to not feel a little cynical about somber nodding over the threat posed to “informed expertise” when this is coming from that most elite of journalistic institutions, and hard not to laugh when you’re an anthropologist who during fieldwork in Cairo met plenty of wire agency journalists who didn’t speak Arabic. Informed expertise? It seems at least as likely to thrive on the free-for-all web as in the elite print media.
For example, Kakutani decries the possibilites of “postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent” on Wikipedia, which gets “way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica” [sic]. But it’s a glaring omission when any journalist compares Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica without mentioning the Nature research project that famously compared the accuracy of entries in both encyclopedias. Was the finding of the Nature investigation an excess of “inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent” entries on Wikipedia? No. As Jim Giles summarized it, “The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” (And Nature, by the way, knows how to spell Encyclopaedia Britannica.)‡
Then there’s the fact that bloggers have been responsible for bringing news to the attention of the world that might otherwise have been ignored or supressed by the traditional media. Let’s take, for example, the case of the Egyptian blogosphere. In October 2006, bloggers were the first to report a mass assault on women in the streets of Cairo during the post-Ramadan feast holiday that Egypt’s state-run media failed to report. As Rania Al Malky reports at length in Arab Media and Society,
“The incidents were initially met with zero coverage in the press and on satellite channels. Some bloggers alleged that Al Jazeera had footage of the episode but was given strict orders by the authorities not to air it. And so it remained for three days until Nawara Negm, daughter of leftist poet Ahmed Fouad Negm and outspoken Islamist thinker and journalist Safinaz Kazem, appeared on Dream TV’s magazine show Al Aashera Masa’an (The 10 O’clock Show) hosted by Mona El Shazly. Nawara was originally invited to critique Ramadan TV shows, but suddenly diverted the issue to talk about the Downtown assaults that were being discussed all over the Internet.”
(See also Sharon Otterman for an extensive discussion of Egyptian female bloggers.) So without the bloggers, the event might never have made it into the mainstream media. The Egyptian blogosphere has also consistently been an early source of eyewitness accounts, in both Arabic and English, of government supression of the democracy protest movement Kefaya, not to mention the means by which the movement propagates itself.
With Web 2.0 (and eBay and Amazon.com§) we may be seeing a new era of the ‘Long Tail‘ (or, as Keen pessimistically puts it, “everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience”), but that doesn’t mean that we don’t still see talent rising to the top with new media technologies. It’s not only the traditional media and culture industry that are able to “discover, nurture, and reward elite talent,” as Keen puts it. While everyone may be able to create music and dance and post these online for an intimate audience (see, for example, my 3-year old niece perform the hula), not everyone will author an Aunt Jackie and get signed by producer Jermaine Dupri.
OK, so what happens when we try to apply Keen’s argument¤ to Anthropology 2.0? Read the rest of this entry »