Clay Shirky on Keen's "Cult of the Amateur"

I think Clay Shirky is brilliant, and he's written here below replying to Andrew Keen's new book Cult of the Amateur.  I haven't read the book yet, but in it apparently Keen is making the argument that the amateurization of content production vis a vis web 2.0 technologies (blogging, wiki etc.) is destroying our culture by democratizing access for amateurs and drastically lowering overall quality. No question that the general point is right, but as Shirky has noted the real value will be created either through creation of content or its filtering; the third traditional role of content providers, delivery, is now basically valueless (except for the newspaper on my door on Sunday morning, which becomes the physical centerpiece around which my Sunday family time/ritual occurs).

So in an era of proliferating junk media, filtering does indeed become a valuable "hard problem" to solve.  For me the question gets personally applicable fast when we consider the strategy of Integral Life, which will charge (at least in the early stages of its lifecycle) subscription fees for access to the content and community.  The VC in me makes the obvious critique: in an era when online community is ubiquitously free and content is proliferating to the point where, with good filtering, intelligent and interesting but free voices can be found in the blogosphere (to some extent even in integral circles), than we're nuts to try to charge for access.  All true, but the easy point notwithstanding, that Integral Life does have content that is available nowhere else - 7 terabytes of some of the more profound audio and video conversations and events that have occurred in the integral space over the past 5 years, I'd make the other point that price is merely a reflection of value committed to some form of social bargain.  The reason we like clubs and communities that have some degree of selectivity is that they act as filtering functions to match us with other people who share our intentions, whether it be a golf club or an entrepreneur's organization.  Not only does perceived value go down when these clubs become free, the lack of price then requires no material commitment from each participant, potentially lowering the quality of the space created within the community.  (Any well-moderated but free forum also argues that price is not the sole means to achieve this, just one possible way.)  More directly, however, the filtering function goes to hell.  A member of a free community has very little (dis)incentive to match their own intentions with those of the group.  I suppose that there is a prevailing myth that the internet should enable most social interactions for free, and I believe this only further desensitizes us to the real value that group-oriented intentional filtering has had.

The last point I'd make is that the postmodern criticism known as the "myth of the given" pointed out that there are no pre-given truth claims: subjectivity is a primary consideration in constructing a version of truth; when combined with the developmental psychologists' observations about differential self and cognitive stage development, it is now obvious that there are literally many different "worlds" that an individual might inhabit, they are all different, and arbitrating the differential views among them is a notorious problem and the source of our culture wars.  To the extent that this is Integral 101, integral becomes a meta-view on the proliferation of these "multiple-worlds" viewpoints as expressed through new media.  In effect, integral still has something immensely valuable to say because it is one of the few frameworks that can take a meta-view on this proliferation.  In fact, just starting with the observation that media democritization was anticipated by integral long before the popularization of the internet suggests that it might hold other valid meta-predictions about what we can expect in coming years; one being that we should expect the leading tip of culture to begin to demand a system that can ordinally rank the truth claims arising from the multiple-worlds - Shirky is close to this when he asks (at the end of his commentary) how do we handle the negative effects of our newfound freedom?  One answer is that broader and more discerning standards of care and responsibility for each social agent have to be fostered in systems of group meaning-making.

Anyway, on to Shirky's commentary:

Here's the full link: http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/05/24/what_are_we_going_to_say_about_cult_of_the_amateur.php

"Keen is correct in seeing that the internet is not an improvement to modern society; it is a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible, or, put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are significantly important, and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.

The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the society they live in. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are transmogrified, replaced, or simply destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the music and newspaper businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences — employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is epochal. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without radical alteration.

This change will create three kinds of loss.

First, people whose jobs relied on solving a hard problem will lose those jobs when the hard problems disappear. Creating is hard, filtering is hard, but the basic fact of making acceptable copies of information, previously the basis of the aforementioned music and newspaper industries, is a solved problem, and we should regard with suspicion anyone who tries to return copying to its previously difficult state.

Similarly, Andrew describes a firm running a $50K campaign soliciting user-generated ads, and notes that some professional advertising agency therefore missed out on something like $300,000 dollars of fees. Its possible to regard this as a hardship for the ad guys, but its also possible to wonder whether they were really worth the $300K in the first place if an amateur, working in their spare time with consumer-grade equipment, can create something the client is satisfied with. This loss is real, but it is not general. Video tools are sad for ad guys in the same way movable type was sad for scribes, but as they say in show biz, the world doesn’t owe you a living.

The second kind of loss will come from institutional structures that we like as a society, but which are becoming unsupportable. Online ads offer better value for money, but as a result, they are not going to generate enough cash to stand up the equivalent of the NY Times’ 15-person Baghdad bureau. Josh Wolf has argued that journalistic privilege should be extended to bloggers, but the irony is that Wolf’s very position as a videoblogger makes that view untenable — journalistic privilege is a special exemption to a general requirement for citizens to aid the police. We can’t have a general exception to that case.

The old model of defining a journalist by tying their professional identity to employment by people who own a media outlet is broken. Wolf himself has helped transform journalism from a profession to an activity; now we need a litmus test for when to offer source confidentiality for acts of journalism. This will in some ways be a worse compromise than the one we have now, not least because it will take a long time to unfold, but we can’t have mass amateurization of journalism and keep the social mechanisms that regard journalists as a special minority.

The third kind of loss is the serious kind. Some of these Andrew mentions in his book: the rise of spam, the dramatically enlarged market for identity theft. Other examples he doesn’t: terrorist organizations being more resilient as a result of better communications tools, pro-anorexic girls forming self-help groups to help them remain anorexic. These things are not side-effects of the current increase in freedom, they are effects of that increase. Spam is not just a plague in open, low-entry-cost systems; it is a result of those systems. We can no longer limit things like who gets to form self-help groups through social controls (the church will rent its basement to AA but not to the pro-ana kids), because no one needs help or permission to form such a group anymore.

The hard question contained in Cult of the Amateur is “What are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom?” Our side has generally advocated having as few limits as possible (when we even admit that there are downsides), but we’ve been short on particular cases. It’s easy to tell the newspaper people to quit whining, because the writing has been on the wall since Brad Templeton founded Clarinet. It’s harder to say what we should be doing about the pro-ana kids, or the newly robust terror networks.

Those cases are going to shift us from prevention to reaction (a shift that parallels the current model of publishing first, then filtering later), but so much of the conversation about the social effects of the internet has been so upbeat that even when there is an obvious catastrophe (as with the essjay crisis on Wikipedia), we talk about it amongst ourselves, but not in public.

Comments

[Tom Armstrong]

Robb, you have an elitist mindset. Just because tons of content is available to us immediately doesn't mean that there isn't adequate filtering that follows after.

Want to know world news? Click on the New York Times website. It's pretty immediate and plenty filtered. Want to know things wholly through the filter of the elite, restrict your reading to Forbes and Vanity Fair.

From what I've read, from professional sources, a bunker mentality of any kind isn't healthy. If the terrorists were truly worldly they would be more sympathetic with the hoi polloi and less inclined to blow them up. We would all hate for the I-L caste to devolve into a paranoid group fearful of the Great Unwashed.

In David Berreby’s book “Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind” [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0316090301/ ] it talks about divisions and divisiveness that occurs in the ways people rather too easily sort themselves.

Sort less, I [an amateur] say. Some animals are not more equal than others.

[Robb]

Tom, apparently you have an elitist mindset, too, because the New York Times is a pre-filtered collection of content. And in fact, you've made my point: people are willing to pay for the NYT because it is filtered. So while I jest about your elitism, it is because the only thing I'm saying about content filtering that is in the least bit elitist is that some people are better at it than others, and apparently millions of NYT readers agree with me. Filtering is worth something, whether it be in online content or offline interaction. The internet by its structure will take care of the availability issue, the other end of the sorting spectrum. (Metaphorically agency/communion.)

[Tom Armstrong]

The New York Times "is pre-filtered." The NYT "is filtered." Now I am really confused.

The New York Times is now online. Most of it's content is free. But even as hardcopy, its owners/editors WANT to reach ALL readers.

You want to impose a fee on I-L users to exclude people. To create a club, as you say.

Here, you are in opposition to the discovery of Kind scientists who find that it is division [which you seek] which is the cause of divisiveness. It is NOT the other way around as you and most people suppose. "Inclusiveness defeats divisiveness." That is not what most people intuit to be the case, but it is so.

Perhaps for fiscal reasons a fee should be charged at I-L, but your justification for the fee is unsound. Keeping out the hoi polloi won't make it a richer place, it will only mean the members of the club are richer in the sense of being wealthier.

The filtered/unfiltered issue is unimportant. We have long had our choice of either or both. The great advantage of blogger journalists, the Vast Fourth Squared Estate, is that they find needles in haystacks that wouldn't otherwise be found. AND THEN, AND THEN, the issues get picked up by more-professional organizations where PERHAPS greater sense can be made of wider issues comprised of narrow topics.

But this is little different than it has always been. And I would certainly maintain that it is healthy for the public to (generally) always have access to raw data and we should allow, freely, for its promulgation. Otherwise, we lose track of the validity of what filtering there is. [North Korea is an example of a place where filtering has gone amok.]

The idea that Wikipedia has been met with a catastrophe is melodramatic. People just, generally, need to remember what Wikipedia IS -- that there is a price (and danger] for/(in) instantly available, up-to-date information, that the Wiki folks are trying to deal with. The outcome of all this will be semi-satisfactory. Best outcomes are usually trades that are semi-satisfactory. Or, maybe the "problem" never will be resolved (or resolvable), and THAT will be semi-satisfactory.

Am I missing something here? Am I just magnificently and completely right about everyhing ... or, less likely, am I stupidly missing the whole point of your post?

[Tom Armstrong]

Speaking of filtering, I just got my Holons email. Holons is supposedly now a blog, but the blogginess has quickly been filtered out of it and it has now become the Sears Catalog of Integral. Buy, buy, buy your Wilberian Power Tools, now, now, now. It's spooky has hell. Maybe you have a point in your post, Robb.

[Robb Smith]

Well, the term "blog" presupposes too much subjectively for me to debate that point. Holons is what it is, and some people probably appreciate the mix of news, commentary and new product availability, and others probably don't. Disappointment derives from expectation, and I suppose we haven't met yours. However, I presume it is different than the Sears catalog in that most people don't get upset at their Sears catalog.

[Tom Armstrong]

Sorry. I was wrong. I like Sears Catalogs ... and Holons, still. But it is filtered. Not for excellence (or JUST for excellence), but to make a wee bit of product push.

I think it is a bit of a bad thing to confuse content [ie, news, information, opinion meant to stimulate/interest readers] with product placements. [I saw The Squid and the Whale last night -- they sneaked in a Purina advert. Aaaay!]

[Corinne Sutter]

Dear Robb, this was exactly the point of what I was saying to you back in June. A `customer` is someone embedded in the holonic worldspace, where the gross current conditions dictate that there be a `marketplace`. You`re the `CEO`, we`re the `customers`. I believe Ken`s work sees those identities as transitory, and yet we can`t all be in the same room together. I don`t envy your position, honestly speaking. You`re trying to create a participatory viable entity and the amount of limitation in this system is massive. Or is it? There is a simultaneous range of emotions at play here-I think I can speak for others as well-like wanting to be in more inclusive role at I-W (but being unable to because of whatnot life conditions), yes, putting up a fence will exclude others, but it will also keep the field from being trampled and destroyed. And yet how could I and so many others through all their range of knowledge and experiences that correlate with Integral Theory RESONATE with the practices, the praxis? Is the Ground really as fixed as we think it is? And who decides the `RULES`? It would be unfortunate for you to miss out on the full experience of the entire community, and yet you need to maintain a sort of INTEGRITY (agency) of I-W. Unfortunate about the elitist comment. I support you in these hard decisions. Please don`t stop asking the hard questions-or fixing on a solution because it`s convenient. The NY Times had to about face today, yes? Thanks for listening.
Sincerely, Corinne Sutter (Tokyo)

[Robert Payne]

And as Corrine concludes, all of the NY Times content is now free. Why? Because pulling content out from behind a subscription wall allows search engines to see it, which in turn generates more traffic, subsequently driving and satisfying more advertisers. To avoid getting into a lengthy discussion about the lack of true separation between editorial and advertising, I'll just say,
Keen is annoying. Fortunately, most of us are equipped with our own filters that help us govern what content is of most value - amateur or professional.
If anything the amateurs are pushing the professionals to truly distinguish themselves and demonstrate why they are professionals. The beauty of the democratization of the web is we can CHOOSE to enjoy or filter little nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that permeate out from professionals and the so called "cult of amateurs."