the amateurs shall inherit the earth
After the professionals have passed out, repeatedly *headdesk*-ing themselves into unconsciousness.
But more seriously, I saw an entertaining interview last night which featured Andrew Keen, the author of Cult of the Amateur. In summary, an influx of amateur video editors, bloggers, journalists and pretty much every other profession into the internet is causing a surfeit of mediocrity. And horrendously long sentences like that one. It’s too easy to dismiss this as just another rant by someone who resents the usurpation of his journalistic soapbox. Wait. Another horrendously long sentence. *sigh*. It’s all a bit shite, basically - and I’m not talking about my sentence structure either.
Actually, I read Andrew Keen’s blog regularly and he makes some excellent discussion points (I read it on the internet, blogs are boring [and he hasn't even read mine, does he know what a massive datapoint he's missing?] and McLuhan’s Revenge are particularly interesting).
A brief digression into a piece of history that I want to get off my chest.
I’ve long since railed against what I called the “cult of the journalist” which pervaded certain sections of the local blogosphere a few years ago. Roughly it translates to mean “I’m a journalist in real life. Therefore my anecdotes, spliced into a comment as gospel, have more authority than your anecdotes, so sod off”. Effectively a conversation stopper. Also a position of false authority because clearly, their anecdotes don’t trump anyone else’s anecdotes. Even more recently, there has been another manifestation, the “cult of the lawyer”. Rinse, repeat and add a few random Latin legalese phrases and you’re all set for a new form of intellectual snobbery on the internets. After all, “quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur”, right? [Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Nor am I a native speaker of Latin, but I am an avid wannabe snob. That counts for something, surely?]. This technique also works for economists and computer scientists. Many a time have I told people online that they should abandon their fancy new fangled computers and get their n00bish asses back to an abacus. Except I haven’t really. Well, ok. I may have flamed a few people on Slashdot; but that doesn’t count.
Another part of the problem, the frequent confusion between citizen journalism, civic journalism and their relationship to journalism as a whole.
In places like Wikipedia; the problem is inverted. There aren’t enough real experts and too many internet experts (internexperts?). This leads to innaccuracies, distortions, slanting of viewpoints by an agenda driven vocal minority and an all-round democratization of information sharing. Oh, has anyone seen Conservapedia? I sense a death flotilla for other pretenders.
The problem is that I approach this argument from a diametrically opposed angle. We don’t need less material on the internet or anywhere else. We just need better ways of cutting through the crap to get to the err.. nuggets. Recommendation systems. Noise filters. Automated preference selectors. Blacklists. Adaptive agents that can scurry around the internet and make contextual decisions on what we’d like. Reputation systems and semi-automated methods of discerning credibility. What we don’t need are man-made or self imposed quality barriers to the very act of participation; and those barriers are precisely the solution that Cult of the Amateur seems to advocate.
The problem isn’t the influx of massive amounts of content (most of it shite). The problem is sifting through all of it to find useful, interesting and otherwise ogleworthy things. Like the totally NSFW cameltoe cluster, for example. Or even the candidate logos for London 2012.
Editorial aside: I’m following the Darwinian method of mixing serious stuff with random oglecandy material. I think it works quite well. And yes, I just called a goatse-esque London 2012 logo oglecandy. Fear for my sanity.
On 07-Jun-07 at 8:35 am,
Darwin wrote:
Maybe something like the peer review process seen with reputable journals might be able to cut off the crap to get to the nuggets? Ok so ocassionally crap does get through in the form of elaborate hoaxes, but it’s rather rare and the scandal afterwards is enough to put most people off from publishing false results.
On 07-Jun-07 at 8:49 am,
drac wrote:
But in a peer review process, there is an inherent item of value (your reputation) attached to your review.
Online, that assessment is both risk free and capable of being gamed - for example, if you had a site which voted for “popular” articles; then I can totally see collusion working - see an oldish article on how to game Digg
And isn’t gaming search engines more or less the same thing? There is an entire industry around SEO
On 07-Jun-07 at 10:53 am,
Curious Yellow wrote:
The same thing is happening with photogs as well. Used to be that a photog who could afford the kit to get started up could make a decent living shooting stock photos and doing the odd wedding/function here and there.
These days everyone and their Thundercat can afford decent kit and have driven these mediocre photogs out of a job resulting in them crying foul and throwing their toys out of the pram. Some established photogs are really pissed off at amateurs who submit photos to microstock photosites like Fotolia for fun because it’s a thrill to see someone buying your photo even if it’s for like 50 euro cents or something. But eventually, these are the bought for the quality of the photos and the true pros will have to up their game thus whittling out the mediocre ones and bettering the quality of the industry as a whole.
With journalism I reckon the same applied. If you’re a decent writer then people will keep coming back.
I’m hardly ever on digg these days because of the sheer amount of non-newsworthy shit on there. Like “OMG!!! There is a 12th icon on the iphone that I found by using an IR filter in photoshop on the picture of a reflection of Steve Jobs’ underwear in a car mirror!”
On 07-Jun-07 at 10:54 am,
Curious Yellow wrote:
Comment at haste, regret crap grammar/meaningless sentences at leisure eh?
On 07-Jun-07 at 10:55 am,
Curious Yellow wrote:
In haste even.
Fuck.
I’ll stop now.
On 07-Jun-07 at 7:05 pm,
drac wrote:
I’m not sure about the crap grammar thing - by my impossibly high and completely incoherent standards, your first comment was pretty legible.
True dat about the photogs; I guess the whining is mostly to do with the people who can’t afford to/can’t be arsed to up their game and are thus priced out of most jobs.
I don’t know why I’m arguing for amateurs though.
“look, my 5 year old can fire up Dreamweaver and build a website; wtf are you charging me all this money” type arguments are the bane of the webdev peeps I know.
Yay for doing obscure and specialized jobs that haven’t yet been breached by the hordes of inky fingered amateurs.
On 08-Jun-07 at 5:14 am,
N wrote:
“The cult of the amateur” would make more sense if so many of the ‘professionals’ weren’t so mediocre, especially in the journalism field…heck even in the music field…at the end of the day not much of what people do is ‘rocket science’
On 08-Jun-07 at 9:50 am,
drac wrote:
But but but … they have a degree! (ok, not all of them do). They work in a real newspaper. That trumps their ability (or lack thereof). Surely it does?!
Say it is so.
My image of professional journalists, each at the top of their game, has been ruined. Thanks, co25!
*snigger*
Actually, I’m not so sure about the music thing though. I find that I prefer the more unconventional (like Spektor) or the people who obviously have other interests (like Brian May) or the really bizarre types (like Buckethead or Aphex Twin).
On 08-Jun-07 at 2:21 pm,
Curious Yellow wrote:
Twin wins hard.
Try Blockhead if you have some time on your hands, Music By Cavelight especially.