IT IS ENGLISH BLOG

It must be very nice for Andrew Keen to get such wonderful (I assume free) publicity for his anti-blogging diatribe, courtesy of the British tax payer. Not just free publicity but top class (prime time) free publicity, which is what the interview this morning with Jim Naughtie on “Today” (Radio 4’s flagship programme) is.

This is not the first time the BBC has decided to publicise this arrogantly entitled book – “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assulting Our Economy”. I downloaded a chunk of it from the BBC Newsnight blog last month and suffice to say that some (not all) of the supposedly amateur comments were to my (assumedly amateur) mind more interesting than Andrew Keen’s pompous text.

Obviously Mr Keen, who is so worried by the ability of “the Web 2.0 revolution” (as he calls it) to decimate “the ranks of our cultural gatekeepers” does not have to worry too much himself, as with the BBC (one of our great cultural gatekeepers) on his side how can he lose? I’m sure the publicity they are giving him (funded by the masses of course) will at least get him a few readers (unfortunately myself included) and allow him to sell a few books!

Having said all this, I do agree that it makes for a lively, if rather overdue, debate. However, it reminds me a little about the effects of the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the way in which it allowed the masses to read the Bible. This article on “The Birth of Printing” from the Springfield Library tells us that “the effects of Gutenberg’s press were quickly felt across Europe” and that within 50 years 35,000 editions had been issued.

Sorry, Mr. Keen, but the genie of the internet is out of the bottle. Its effects may not all be positive, but it is certainly here to stay! As the Pulitzer prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman puts it in the title of his book about “the globalized world in the twenty-first century” – “The World is Flat”. Not completely flat, I would say, but yes, interestingly flatter. We certainly live in very interesting times!

(You can read more about this controversy at the blog “Crowdsourcing: tracking the rise of the amateur”, where Jeff Howe, who was at first happy that someone was “finally poking a stick in the Web 2.0 happy hive” later wondered why the antagonist had “to wield such a clumsy, ineffective tool”.)

ETYM

I refer you to my recent item on Web 2.0 – again as sign that I am in tune with the Zeitgeist, or at least that defined by some of our major cultural gatekeepers!