pudge's Journal: Andrew Keen

I saw this Andrew Keen moron on NewsHour tonight. He wrote "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture." Why is he on? He's just a troll.

He says that "entertainment" is worse online. He said:

The key argument is that the so-called Democritization of the Internet is actually undermining reliable information and high-quality entertainment by replacing mainstream media content -- high-quality radio, television, newspapers, publishing, music -- with user-generated content, we're actually doing away with information, high-quality information, high-quality entertainment, and replacing it with user-generated content which is unreliable, inane, and often rather corrupt.

What Keen doesn't understand is that 90 percent of everything is crap. The Internet is no exception. The Internet has no more crap, as a percentage of the whole, than the mainstream media does: there's just a lot more stuff to sift through to find the 10 percent that isn't crap.

I agree most of the Internet is crap, but so are most movies, most news stories, most music records, and most radio programs. And there's excellent versions of each of those online.

Let's assume that for, whatever reason, mainstream media is better. So what's the solution? He says he does not want government intervention, so they only solution is to encourage people to seek "high quality" information and education, but if you can do that, why does it matter if you encourage them to seek it online or elsewhere?

Then he goes into this thing about how people should not "waste" so much time online writing about what they had for breakfast or thought about a recent TV show. I agree, but that is purely subjective, and who is to say that your silly book, or the TV program you are on, are not also wasted? Why not go and save a whale instead of worrying about silly things like culture, that will take care of themselves one way or another anyway?

Keen is another smart idiot: someone who is generally bright, has an idea, and thinks that he can write and think and talk about it competently. He's wrong about that, too.

The Internet is Crap

[Nymz]

It's typical of the old media, to belittle the new media, because thier power and jobs are threatend by it. Once they were the gate-keepers of information, and they alone defined what was 'high-quality'. So if a story was important to them then they promoted it, and if a story contradicted their worldview then they buried it.

I suppose the opposite is true as well, that 'low-quality' producers of information, on the 'democritized' internet, might not think too highly of Andrew Keen's centralized-power par

O, I C

[Bill Dog]

...people should not "waste" so much time online writing about what they had for breakfast...

Right, because that's trivial compared to what Fox News ran... all... frickin... weekend... long -- O.J.! You see, we all need to focus less on ourselves, and more on celebrities. Because, afterall, the MSM doesn't get paid when we pay attention to ourselves and our friends.

Re:

[pudge]

Exactly.

It's one thing to say there is SOME mainstream news that is better than MOST Internet news. But there is SOME Internet news that is also better than MOST mainstream news!

Hard to ignore

[multimed]

Then he goes into this thing about how people should not "waste" so much time online writing about what they had for breakfast or thought about a recent TV show. I agree, but that is purely subjective, and who is to say that your silly book, or the TV program you are on, are not also wasted?

Not only is it subjective, but more importantly, there's a fundamental issue of freedom. Freedom of speech to write about possibly horrifically boring things, and freedom for everyone else to ignore it. That's a criti