Written By Sepideh Saremi | May 22, 2007 | Share This |

On Friday May 18, Craig Newmark, Robert Scoble, Clay Shirky and Andrew Keen met on stage to debate the merit of today’s “Web 2.0″ revolution at the Personal Democracy Forum. There were a number of notable people in the audience - Jeff Jarvis, the women from Feministing, and dozens more bloggers hidden behind their glowing laptops.

The debate centered around Keen’s controversial, soon to be published book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.” Keen’s thesis is that the internet is causing a decline of professionalism, particularly in journalism, and that the blogosphere is “a kennel of dogs who are all barking and don’t know how to listen.” Our current structures are disintegrating, he said, in the face of these amateur networks.

Not surprisingly, the panel and the room (aka, the kennel manifest) jumped in gleefully after Keen presented his ideas. Shirky, Newmark and Scoble each took turns essentially debunking his book.

Shirky argued that the death of culture isn’t necessarily bad, citing the decline of vaudeville when movies emerged. He used the example of the high cost of advertising being challenged by cheaply created viral marketing, to point out that big-budget advertising is really more about controlling access to a distribution bottleneck than about creativity. Web 2.0 opens distribution, he said, thus helping to “level the playing field”.

Newmark talked about the wisdom of crowds, aka democracy, as an equalizer. When experts aren’t great at their jobs, the crowd fills in the gaps of information. Newmark admitted that there are issues with crowdsourcing problem solving, but maintained that the community will work through any kinks that arise. This is Craigslist’s basic philosophy.

Robert Scoble was much more combative than Shirky or Newmark. He read excerpts from the galley of Keen’s book and called it “a brilliant marketing strategy wrapped in a book.” Keen argued that Web 2.0 can’t be trusted because it doesn’t have any “gatekeepers” (editors, fact-checkers, etc), to which Scoble replied that no one should trust anything - audiences are the new editor, he said. Scoble furthermore pointed out the comments section of any popular blog acts as the proverbial “gatekeeper”, where the crowd is ready to point out and argue any errors. Traditional media doesn’t foster that sort of participation from its audiences, which makes it arguably less accountable than blogs and other collaborative media.

There were a million hands up at the end of this session, but not a single memorable question. It struck me, though, that Keen’s “old-guard” stance is controversial because it’s so rarely addressed. The so-called kennel isn’t even tuned in to the concepts of “amateur” and “professional”, which kind of proves Keen’s point. In the end though, I have to side with the new media advocates - the power of crowd proves itself time and time again in citizen journalism, open source, etc. Web 2.0 helps close the digital information divide, which, though it may displace some of the “old-guard”, is returning power to a global public.

Further Reading