View Discussion (requires Quicktime)
Self-proclaimed 'antichrist of Silicon Valley' Andrew Keen, author of recent web 2.0 polemic 'The Cult of the Amateur - How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy' discussed the implications of his thinking in a round table discussion at Watershed on 7 September 2007. Special guests were Ana Kronschnabl, an award winning filmmaker and CEO of digital media consultancy FluffyLogic, also founder of plugincinema.com and co-author of 'PlugInTurnOn: A Guide to Filmmaking for the Internet', and writer/director Hazel Grian (Licorice), who has been working on an umber of gaming and interactive narrative projects including the successful Alternate Reality Game 'Meigeist' and the hit online show 'Kate Modern'. The event was chaired by Mark Cosgrove, Head of Programme at Watershed. Recordings of the event can be viewed by clicking the above link. See also below Dr Tom Abba's response, if you would like to make your own contribution to the continuing debate, please email mark@watershed.co.uk and selected comments will be posted online.
With thanks to Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Visit Andrew Keen's website www.aftertv.com.
Following essay is written by Dr. Tom Abba, Senior Lecturer Media at the University of the West of England as a reponse on the round table discussion with Andrew Keen, who states in his book The Cult of the Amateur that Internet is killing today's culture and assaulting the economy.
'On September 7th, Watershed Media Centre, as part of its 25th Anniversary celebrations, hosted a round table discussion between Andrew Keen, author of ‘Cult of the Amateur’, Hazel Grian, Director of Licorice Film and Ana Kronchnabl, CEO of Fluffylogic.
The discussion, chaired by Mark Cosgrove of Watershed, addressed in broad and incisive terms the implications of Keen’s thinking for media organisations and practitioners. Absent, though, was an engagement with the academic basis for Keen’s sometimes vituperative assault on the ecology of new media. As such, I offer the following short essay as a first round response to the issues raised by the discussion.
It should be noted that this response is based on notes taken during the round table session, and does not benefit from a thorough reading of Keen’s published text. Further contributions will address this omission.
Sifting the Signal from the Noise
A critical response to Watershed’s ‘Cult of the Amateur’.
In his response to Keen’s short introduction, Mark Cosgrove addressed some of the common accusations made with regard to Keen’s authored work, personal appearances and intellectual stance. Of these, the charge that he stands as an elitist with regard to internet culture was met with a determined “what’s wrong with that?”. Although this accusation and Keen’s subsequent response were dealt with relatively briefly, the implications resonated throughout the discussion. Keen’s continued advocation of the importance of ‘gatekeepers’, apparently ensuring a degree of objectivity within media production, arose time and again in the form of a Web 2.0-enabled challenge to the elitism inherent in such a role. Whilst gatekeepers have undoubtedly worked to stifle experimentation within a cultural mainstream, the remitting cry of rage against an intellectual elite from the advocates of Web 2.0 technologies appears undermined in light of the continued success of experimental media form throughout the last century. Among others, the Tel Quel Group (1) managed to develop a genuinely alternative movement within the framework of a French cultural elite who might, in their role as gatekeepers of traditional thought, have been expected to successfully suppress radical thought. If we take a long view of the history of culture, we might see that gatekeepers, throughout history, actually enable challenge. Without a position, and established hierarchy to rebel against, what would remain is a cacophony of voices without direction and purpose.
Furthermore, the suggestion that old and new media are in opposition, as espoused by Keen himself, represents a facile dissimulation of the reality of a merged media landscape. To present new media, as blogs, user-generated content and online activity, as as being somehow engaged in a combative action against the old; traditional film, literature, art and music’ willfully ignores the interconnected nature of contemporary media forms. Blogging does not exist in binary opposition to journalism, rather it seeks to present an alternative viewpoint that is, paradoxically (for the advocates of a continued trench war) dependent on the presence of traditional journalism in the first place. Ana Kronchnabl’s useful illustration of the New York Times’ reporting of the early stages of the Iraq conflict nevertheless neglected to consider that an established news source has to bring information to the public’s attention in order that it be subsequently discussed and dissected within the expanse of the ‘blogosphere’ (2). The blog attached to BBC Radio 4’s news programme, PM, serves as a pertinent example. The blog, The Glass Box, provides a debating ground for items featured in the evening’s broadcast, referencing content already transmitted on a traditional media platform. The voice of the disenfranchised, then, is reliant on the presence of those possessing official sanction. A richer appreciation of the merged nature of old and new media might be gained from consideration of Marshall McLuhan’s description of a ‘media ecology’ (3) within which media forms cross-breed and interact over time, and are capable of tracing those heritages back through a tangled history. Blogging, as a new media form, has among its antecedents not only any number of op-ed columnists in national newspapers the world over, but also Defoe, Pepys and the Situationist (4) movement. The cult of celebrity prevalent in contemporary culture also has its part to play in blogging; a desire to be seen and recognised, regardless of ability or talent, is present across both old and new media platforms.
Blogging is also, despite claims to the contrary complicit in a continuation of the elitist agenda. BoingBoing (5) (subtitled A Directory of Wonderful Things), in many ways a digital digest of the best of the web, nevertheless works though a system of gatekeepers, whose role is to filter content such that, on the one hand, quality shines through, but additionally, material not fitting within the editors’ political agenda is excluded. Within an emergent media ecology, and specifically seen as such, this is not necessarily detrimental. If your perspective of copyright control and Digital Rights Management does not fall within that espoused by BoingBoing (6), you are free to read elsewhere. What remains though, is a model of gatekeepered content, and to claim otherwise is foolish.
Meritocracy, the proposed democratic alternative to an elitist agenda, is present is some areas of Web 2.0. YouTube (7) ostensibly operates a meritocratic system. Content is voted on by viewers, recommended in a semi-viral manner, and is passed from email to email as promotion circumventing the traditional route of commissioning, producing and marketing. However, Thomas Jefferson’s definition of democracy as mob rule (8) comes to mind when the statistics are examined. In the month prior to writing this essay, the most viewed material on YouTube (9) includes, within the ten highest ranked videos, four alternative edits of Miss Teen Carolina’s response to a question about geography, two responses to Britney Spears’ mental state, and only one excerpt that might be regarded as culturally significant to a wider audience; the promotional video for Google Earth’s Night Sky feature. Among the 100 most viewed, no video features original artistic content not remixed from elsewhere, or simply remediated verbatim from an existing source.
While attacking YouTube for its reliance on puerile content is admittedly lazy criticism, it nevertheless serves to address the remix culture in a manner not considered by Keen or the panel at Watershed. David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s 1996 examination of new media; Remediation (10) ; addressed web culture, pre-Web 2.0, in light of any new medium’s tendency to ape, or appropriate, content from the medium that preceded it. Television’s first steps as an emergent medium were made in light of it being perceived as radio with pictures, or film on a small screen. Film’s were as recorded theatre. The internet, as evidenced by the goldrush fever of the late 1990s, was seen as a new platform upon which to deliver established content. Websites were designed to be online versions of television stations; the acquisition of Time Warner by AOL and the subsequent panic about what exactly to do with the content thereby acquired is as good an example as any of this misinterpretation.
Bolter and Grusin identify three modes of the translation of content from one medium to another (11):
The first refashions media content, while still marking the presence of the older media (present in recorded CD Rom material, where the content is presented ‘as is’). Their second order, the most commonly seen within Web 2.0, addresses a discontinuation of older media into new media, making use of collage principles and displaying the montage of text, image, animation and video visibly. Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites, alongside early CD Rom multimedia artefacts, typically exhibit this aspect of Bolter & Grusin’s model. The third order, identified as the absorption of older media, works to minimise discontinuity. Bolter and Grusin point to computer games, Myst and Doom, as the remediation of cinema, labeling them “Interactive films”.
The logic of remediation, though, is an inevitable byproduct of the development of a new medium. As critical perception of the changed landscape becomes clearer, it is addressed on its own terms, and in due course, the content of that medium comes to reflect the possibilities afforded by new tools and techniques. Web 2.0, in this light, can be seen as a move away from remediative thinking. User-generated content, the democratisation of the medium proposed by Tim O’Reilly, and the rise of the individual voice are important steps toward citizenry making use of a media platform in ways not wholly reliant on the framework of traditional media. As I have suggested, though, the thinking inherent in traditional media still persists, and it is here that a tension between old and new media, rather than polar opposition, manifests itself.
Compounding such difficulty is the necessity for new media, alongside wider contemporary culture, to function within a PostModern landscape. PostModernism celebrates the collapse of the barriers between high and low art enabling, in theory, a landscape of meritocratic order to exist. Knowingly self-referential filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino being a prime example, are unafraid to remix elements from previous media forms and create content that operates across multiple levels of textual dialogue simultaneously. His audience takes pleasure in active participation in the viewing experience, deconstructing the filmmaker’s craft. New media, and Web 2.0 in particular, operate within this frame. Blogging is often the deconstruction of content presented by traditional outlets. Whether as an oppositional voice, or a complementary one, it remains for the most part a manifestation of intertextuality.
Interestingly, though, and uncommented upon in light of Keen’s argument, the retention of gatekeepers within Web 2.0, our desire for regulation of content in some form, even for a hierarchy of merit to arise, speaks to a call for Modernist principles to reassert themselves into this peculiarly PostModern landscape. While Web 2.0 is deregulated, and BoingBoing’s defence of anti DRM activists suggests a need for unmediated remixing to flourish, within these PostModern qualities a new Modernism is stirring. Web 2.0 is undoubtedly the second stage of a larger cultural project, and the medium will undoubtedly develop its own critical language, both in terms of analysis and, more significantly, production. It is pertinent to ask then whether that language, the grammar of new media, will seek to frame Web 3.0 in terms of what is native, or neoteric (12), to this new ecology. In its short life, blogging has produced a collection of cultural gatekeepers. Whether BoingBoing’s walled garden of content, or in the tendency of well written and articulate material to become that which is most widely read. Trends and fashions move faster in new media than in its traditional counterpart ensuring that not only is Fox News now widely recognised a a neo-conservative polemic, but also that YouTube, once the darling of the media set, is likely to increasingly reflect the agenda of a creative landscape struggling to come to terms with an increasingly deregulated commercial environment.
Change, once begun, is practically impossible to stop, and if a gradual framework of Neo-Modernist thinking emerges within new media, Andrew Keen’s relevant doubts might be addressed, and in a manner that moves culture forward, rather than relying on the language and idiom of the past.
Dr. Tom Abba
Senior Lecturer: Media
Faculty of Creative Arts
University of the West of England
1 - The collection of French writers and artists grouped around the Tel Quel journal during the late 1960s. For more details see: http://www.marxists.org/history/france/tel-quel/no34.htm
2 - The author accepts that a number of blogs have broken news stories before traditional media outlets. The majority of blogged content with regard to news, though, comments on existing material.
3 - The term ‘media ecology’ is generally attributed to Marshall McLuhan. The cultural critic, and student of McLuhan, Neil Postman, used the phrase in a public lecture in 1968, and went on to develop its significance in a series of papers and academic texts exploring the inter-relationships within media landscapes. The columnist John Naughton, most recently made use of Postman’s phrasing in terms of the ecology of new media (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,1723477,00.html).
4 - Guy Debord’s Dada/Surrealist inspired movement of 1957-1968 was responsible for the revival of the flâneur - an observer of culture prevalent in the Paris of the mid 19th Century. The role of the blogger as observer of culture is strikingly similar to the Parisian flâneur.
5 - See http://www.boingboing.net/
6 - compete.com reports BoingBoing’s readership at 600,000 during August 07. While this is only 10% of the BBC’s 6M readers and a fraction of the Guardian’s 1.2M during the same period, it does represent a significant puddle in the lake of opinion makers.
7 - See http://youtube.com/
8 - Jefferson’s full quote reads: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
9 - http://youtube.com/browse?s=mp&t=m&c=0&l=&e=en_US&p=1 The link will, presumably, update each month.
10 - Bolter, David Jay, Grusin, Richard (Eds) (1996): Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press. Cambridge. Mass.
11 - ibid. p46-47
12 - As television before it, it is the belief of the author that it is incumbent on new media to develop a language by which content produced for it genuinely operates within the frame of the medium. 'Neoteric' defined here as 'being of recent origin; modern', is suggestive of such a status.'