Author Andrew Keen has ruffled feathers with his book The Cult of the Amateur, How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy, as reported recently in The Globe & Mail and elsewhere.
As usual I'm caught in the middle, or perhaps the muddle. As a librarian, my imperative has been to embrace the social Web. Yet I've spent the last 10 years teaching students and others that online article databases are better than the Web because the articles are written by professionals and scholars. As Keen -- a Silicon Valley entrepreneur -- points out, however, populist (Web 2.0) websites have flooded the Web with amateurism (photos, writing, video, etc.). This makes it tougher for the pros & scholars to be heard, or make a living, for that matter.
Another Globe article on the 'duality of Wikipedia' points out that Wikipedia's articles on pop-cultural trivia -- e.g. the character John Locke on the TV series Lost -- are typically longer than articles with the same name on important topics -- e.g. the great philosopher John Locke.
The contemporary educational philosopher Neil Postman once wrote how news telecasts reduce everything (from great tragedies to celebrity nonsense) to a lowest-common-denominator of equal significance, by means of segues such as "and now this", which allow the newscaster to jump between unrelated topics, both grave and trite.
The problem with Wikipedia, of course, is the lack of accountability. No specific person is responsible for correcting errors or editing for brevity. And much the same holds for the blogosphere, with its unfounded opinions and endless rehashing of ideas and rumours. Should I be blogging? Arguably not -- I'm no longer a journalist and so I no longer have an earned place in public discourse, nor the qualifications to take part. Perhaps my blog entries are merely derivative mashups of contemporary opinion. Unedited vanities. Welcome to the new media and my 5 minutes of fame. Received wisdom and distillations of what I happen to catch in the media, refracted through my limited understanding, from my particular place in the world.
Which brings me to mashups, which are arguably the essence of today's re-hash culture. The accompanying photo (above) shows one of my own mashups hanging on the wall of a museum. I did the picture of an Arabian man in traffic four years ago, in Photoshop, long before I'd heard the term "mashup", and likely before the word was coined (or at least applied to photographic art).
And the picture you see here is itself a mashup, generated at the site Dumpr, which lets you insert any old photo on your hard drive into one of four museum settings. So there you have it -- a mashup within a mashup. Don't get me wrong, though -- mashups are a lot of fun, and an art form in their own right. A populist art form. Hey, this is remix culture, baby!
