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Marxism and the Cult of the Amateur
Delzhand
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Registered User, Transition Team regular
Last year tech pundit Andrew Keen came out with a book entitled The Cult of the Amateur, a biting criticism of today's social internet. It's not a particularly insightful book, but as a collection of every misguided thought and misinterpreted fact about Web 2.0, it makes an easy target for criticism.
I know Marxist critique seems like an unlikely way to support technology of any kind, given his seeming love affair with the feudal farmer living off the land to support his family. But Marx gives us a few good tools to examine the motives of Keen.
Cultural Matrix
The cultural matrix is the idea that all art, music, academia, government, etc. is a way to keep the worker from realizing what a crappy situation he's in. Remember "The Matrix", a film that has ruined the film industry to have slow motion taken seriously? The title isn't a coincidence.
Proletariat
That would be us. Most of us, at least. Honestly, Marx uses the word as a romanticized version of anyone who works hard but will never make it because the Man keeps him down. Who is the Man, you ask?
Bourgeois
The Man. The collective of wife-swapping, amoral capitalist dogs. They produce movies to distract us, invent new technologies to funnel money from our pockets into theirs, etc.
So - The Cult of the Amateur. Keen's biggest problem is that YouTube and Wikipedia and eBay are threatening what he calls "our most valued cultural institutions". To him, this means professional newspapers and entertainment. He attaches values to these things because of their age, the fact that they generate revenue, and are vetted. He thinks that Encyclopedia Britannica is better than Wikipedia because:
A) It's older
You have to pay for it
And I'm not even skewing this a little. Here's a direct quote.
Whatever you think of Objectivism, you have to admit that tradition and "established" authority are hard to swallow as justification for superiority.
It's almost comical - take things back a few hundred years and I'm sure Keen would have been a monarchy-apologist. It's a textbook example of the Bourgeois trying to keep the Proletariat down.
I have to think that Marx would greatly approve of the internet, though I'm sure the fact that it's controlled at the physical level by a few corporations would grate more than a little. But the idea - the idea! Somehow the bourgeois slipped up and let us proles gain access to a worldwide network of information. And boy did we ever pick it up and run with it. Keen claims that we are massively ignorant and don't deserve to tread on the sacred ground of the information superhighway, because we're all trying to undermine truth.
Whose truth? The bourgeoisie truth. The fact of the matter is that all movies produced by the MPAA, all music from the RIAA, every radio channel, news broadcast - it's all to make money. So anytime we're able to produce and consume news or entertainment for free, we're able to take a bit away from them.
And Keen doesn't like that.
I know Marxist critique seems like an unlikely way to support technology of any kind, given his seeming love affair with the feudal farmer living off the land to support his family. But Marx gives us a few good tools to examine the motives of Keen.
Cultural Matrix
The cultural matrix is the idea that all art, music, academia, government, etc. is a way to keep the worker from realizing what a crappy situation he's in. Remember "The Matrix", a film that has ruined the film industry to have slow motion taken seriously? The title isn't a coincidence.
Proletariat
That would be us. Most of us, at least. Honestly, Marx uses the word as a romanticized version of anyone who works hard but will never make it because the Man keeps him down. Who is the Man, you ask?
Bourgeois
The Man. The collective of wife-swapping, amoral capitalist dogs. They produce movies to distract us, invent new technologies to funnel money from our pockets into theirs, etc.
So - The Cult of the Amateur. Keen's biggest problem is that YouTube and Wikipedia and eBay are threatening what he calls "our most valued cultural institutions". To him, this means professional newspapers and entertainment. He attaches values to these things because of their age, the fact that they generate revenue, and are vetted. He thinks that Encyclopedia Britannica is better than Wikipedia because:
A) It's older
You have to pay for itAnd I'm not even skewing this a little. Here's a direct quote.
Wales was converted by the libertarian idealism espoused by Ayn Rand, a philosophy of rugged self-realization, which stands against tradition and established authority.
Whatever you think of Objectivism, you have to admit that tradition and "established" authority are hard to swallow as justification for superiority.
It's almost comical - take things back a few hundred years and I'm sure Keen would have been a monarchy-apologist. It's a textbook example of the Bourgeois trying to keep the Proletariat down.
I have to think that Marx would greatly approve of the internet, though I'm sure the fact that it's controlled at the physical level by a few corporations would grate more than a little. But the idea - the idea! Somehow the bourgeois slipped up and let us proles gain access to a worldwide network of information. And boy did we ever pick it up and run with it. Keen claims that we are massively ignorant and don't deserve to tread on the sacred ground of the information superhighway, because we're all trying to undermine truth.
Whose truth? The bourgeoisie truth. The fact of the matter is that all movies produced by the MPAA, all music from the RIAA, every radio channel, news broadcast - it's all to make money. So anytime we're able to produce and consume news or entertainment for free, we're able to take a bit away from them.
And Keen doesn't like that.
Delzhand on
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It sounds like he just doesn't get it. The RIAA and MPAA are huge, probably too huge, and can't keep up with the changing landscape. There are people out there that want nothing to do with them, but still want to put out their ideas. Instead of one outlet there are two outlets. There are still tons of teeny-boppers and regular folk out there that will consume whatever they put out.
I've stopped being a consumer of most of their shit for years, if they could put out what I wanted to watch or listen to I would probably go back to being their whore.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I work in the film industry so I see it all the damn time. People constantly pretend like things are out of my reach because they're "too advanced". Then I go online and read a few tutorials and figure it out in a day or so on my own. They're just intimidated by younger people learning new skills since they become a threat in a highly competitive field.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
The Rise And Fall Of Anime Fansubs (Part 1)
The Rise And Fall Of Anime Fansubs (Part 3)
The Rise And Fall Of Anime Fansubs (Part 4)
The Rise And Fall Of Anime Fansubs (Part 5)
Fix'd. Because the internet is basically the world's first test-run of that hypothesis.
Then again, entropy sets in and some things just don't fly anymore. This is where the other side comes in and helps clean house and force the established side to shape up, or even puts itself into the said side given enough effort.
I had the 'internet forums' sig in my earlier post when I read this. Oh sweet irony.
On topic, the wisdom of crowds has been tested and generally shown to be as accurate as experts in a variety of circumstances, so even if people restricted themselves to seeing what monkey flung poo sticks to the wall, they won't be too terribly far off. Of course, noone restrits themselves to the idiots out there and the internet has really only stood to enhance circulation of noteworthy producers. Taking online readership into account, newspaper circulation has grown substantially in comparison to the decline in the 80's and 90's to TV news. On top of this, publications that generally don't get much penetration are now on an even playing field with local incumbents. I'd be reading the Chicago Tribune and little else for my news if it weren't for online access to The Economist, The Atlantic, Financial Times, WaPo, NYT, and others. And that's for objective fare chronicling reality as it exists and commenting on that existence. Subjective media, such as music, movies, and art...well I don't put much stock in what 'experts' consider to be good art. Hell, I disagree with many of them on what constitutes art.
I think both the OP and the position he's criticising are not accurate. Ever since comic books became popular there's been this concern about pop culture (first culture designed to be popular, now redefined as culture the masses themselves create) will in fact replace high culture.
I don't see how they came up with this, honestly. Youtube videos haven't replaced television, just like television didn't replace cinema back when that was the focus of the outcry against vulgarization. User-created media will take its place next to professionally created media as an alternative and as a point of entry into the professional realm. The fact that it's occupying a space doesn't mean it's replacing any of the existing cultural representations.
For the record, this used to be a conservative stance back in the day, but not any more. With the cultivated classes slanting to the left we now know that it's a matter of cultural elitism, not of politics. I've heard plenty of otherwise left-wing researchers make this kinds of complaints. It's a little sad, really.
No, it does actually go back to Socrates complaining about those damnded 'literate' kids writing things whilst on his lawn. That isn't a joke.
With that said, there doesn't seem to be much meat on Keen's arguments. I've tried reading his blog, but his posts are mostly or entirely fluff with not many opinions to nail down one way or the other. The few that do contain something more are nothing but moaning for the good ol' days of the horse-drawn buggy, dressed in different skins. He repeatedly makes the assumption that shuffling money around is much more useful to society than more abstract, less measurable activities like improving distribution efficiency or the collective pool of knowledge.
Socrates complained about books being bad for memory, but he wasn't opposed to people having access to culture in case they'd break it with their stupidity.
And the debate would have been pointless, anyway. To complain about mass culture downgrading higher culture you first need a mass culture in place, so people should at least be generally literate, everybody needs access to basic education, etc. It's a XIX century phenomenon, at best.
But, yeah, literate people complaining about the tastes of the less literate, that's always been there. "Kids these days don't listen to their elders" has been written in every culture that has left a record of its existence.
I always figured it was a reference to geocities type sites and web rings.
I always figured it was an investor buzzword after the Web 1.0 bubble crashed.
No, he complained about the impact that the written word would have on the beauty that was oral tradition and how writing histories down would somehow worsen its preservation.
Not really, I always sold my gen-ed books back at the end of the year and I couldn't say what its title was.
Creative Destruction.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
I'm sorry, this statement is utter nonsense. Marx espoused dialectical materialism, a position wherein technology and the progress of one's material condition were absolutely paramount. He viewed the rise of capitalism and industrialization as something that was supremely beneficial to society, and neither Marx nor Engels ever romanticized or attempted to defend feudalism.
You should know that "Proletariat" is a very, very particular term that refers to workers directly involved in industrial manufacturing. People working on the line in Oshawa and Detroit would be Proletariat, not farmers or people working at McDonalds.
Once again, this was a very particular term, one which is thrown around without context or definition. The long and short of it is, you are most likely bourgeois. While the terms aren't exactly equivalent, there is a similarity between "middle class" and "bourgeois" - both embrace a particular form of social expectation and condition, and both reinforce and espouse certain views of class, capital, and the state that Marx felt was problematic.
There are very good reasons more "traditional" forms of media are more readily accepted than "folk media," or whatever you want to call it. The two most important are credibility and rigor. Most traditional forms of media are going to have an inherent credibility, due in large part to their age and use of medium - if the actual organization has existed for such a long period of time, that seems to indicate that there is something going on that justifies its existence. Further, the use of any particular medium over a long period of time seems to imply that at some level, it works, or, even, excels at the job at which it has been tasked to do, presumably beating out other mediums or variations because of its superiority.
Now, rigor is a word that has a very particular definition in mathematics and logic which I'm not using here. Instead, "rigor" in this sense means something like "a stringent standard." To say that a traditional publication has rigor, one can say that it has developed, over time, stringent standards and modes of operation which have themselves been developed in response to outside pressures. Due to the wild variation between "traditional media," it's hard to speak of any one particular pressure, but some of the most notable would be market forces, intellectual review, and critical reception. In the case of each of these, the media that are subject to each of these outside forces would have to adapt and develop a kind of internal rigor if they were to maintain credibility and existence over time. A newspaper who didn't develop some kind of rigor would eventually lose out in sales and circulation to one that did; likewise, a peer-viewed journal would have to have a special kind of review process, or it would lose credibility in its field compared to other journals with more stringent procedures.
To clarify, if one takes the case of the newspaper, the rigor it exhibits can be anything from internal coherency to style, to subject matter or coverage. The stringent standard it exhibits will do two things: it will give credibility to itself, and, perhaps more importantly, will give the people who consume it (read it), general expectations for the product.
In new forms of media, or "Web 2.0," or "folk media," or whatever you want to call it, there is generally a lack of rigor and a lack of credibility. The latter is something that has more to do with the medium than anything, and will almost certainly change with time - we've already seen vastly increased acceptance of things written online in blogs than there was in 1997, when the term didn't even exist. What's caused this? Well, a number of things, but one of the factors that can't be ignored is the move by traditional media in the same or similar realms of publication - all major news outlets have websites, now, for instance. That gives implicit credibility to the medium.
What I think is more damning about new media, though, is the lack of rigor. Simply put, most information gained from Web 2.0 stuff comes from any bloke who has access to a keyboard and an internet connection - there is no expectation or standard of reporting, biases are unknown, and rarely are processes standardized. Some places, like Wikipedia, have attempted to embrace, half-heartedly, I might add, certain aspects of rigor, but implementing stringent, standardized processes at a base or institutional level, but one of the failings of Web 2.0 media is that the power does not exist with the organization or institution anymore, but with the individual actor. And there are still very few, if any stringent standards applied to the individual actor.
It's important to separate the profit motive from the social condition and the context in which certain forms of media or expression occur. Yes, entertainment is big business, but but the media will only be consumed if it conforms to certain social expectations - ones that are necessarily divorced from any kind of monetary drive.
In closing, you need to reread your Marx, and come to grips that you probably aren't a proletariat. And you wouldn't want to be one anyway.
This is why I think the major industries really slipped up. Now that we're able to access this global network, we know there are alternatives. Hell, the rise in "indie" music alone is due to people like us who refuse to patronize the RIAA. Where would I be without OCremix?
Keen's ethos isn't the only thing out the window. His logical arguments fall flat on their face as well. He says that when bands like Beck and Barenaked Ladies had their remixing contests, it was akin to a chef leaving ingredients on your table or a surgeon giving you the tools to operate on yourself. His analogies are weak, a stretch by any means. But this whole book seems targeted at folks who lament the death of a time that never existed when news anchors were infallible and encyclopedias were the final word on a subject. He's preaching to his choir, and using their worst fears.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking while reading this book. Without getting too political, it seems certain people who claim to support the free market are a bit hypocritical to claim that that these obsolete and dying industries deserve legal protection.
Of course, there is one good argument in his book, something that us regulars in the presidential thread might want to consider. He says that websites like HuffPo and Daily Kos are successful because people are drawn to "news" that reaffirms their beliefs. I have to admit that I'm guilty of this as well, but it's not limited to punditry sites - I know that MSNBC.com has a typically Obama bias (apparently), and it's the first site I check. I know that "echo chamber lol" has been discussed to death in those threads, but does our patronage of certain websites encourage them to purvey sites that pander to their demographic - a self reinforcing bias?
I tend to be bored to death by sites that tell me what I already know although I admit I get some comfort from time to time knowing that I'm not alone in my beliefs. Nobody likes a Bayesian and Dante had a whole circle of hell designated for fence sitters, so I'm not surprised by the tribalism and echo chamber one finds online. I think it's highly unlikely that there is MORE tribalism and echo chamber effects in the modern world than there was 10, 100, or 1000 years ago. I'd be interested to see if someone has done any studies.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
False credibility is worse than no credibility. The average person, when confronted with an unlikely fact, determines whether to believe it in part from where the fact comes from. There are many, many false things written on the Internet that people ignore without a second thought. But as soon as these are written down in a book or newspaper, people believe them even without backing facts. This can be seen in common myths like "The Great Wall of China can be seen with the naked eye from the Moon" and "Before Columbus, people believed the Earth was flat". If somebody ran across these tidbits on a random page, they'd at least Google them before believing. But when they're in an encyclopedia or newspaper, people trust them.
You'd expect that less rigorous publications would lose out to the more rigorous, but this only happens in a few select fields like academic journals. In fact, as more people have started to read it's caused a gradual shift to poor fact-checking. Read an encyclopedia, pick some article, and try to find its sources. Now do the same for Wikipedia. Which is easier to verify? Likely Wikipedia, since it's rather unusual for an encyclopedia to contain a bibliography.
It may be stylistically coherent, and people may have expectations, but those don't translate to accuracy. Especially in articles related to "complex" subjects such as science or math, newspapers are basically just a huge pile of bullshit held together with advertising.
There's no credibility at all in "the medium" -- by which I assume you mean electronic transmission -- because anything can be posted on it at all. Any credibility is derived from external sources. A peer-reviewed journal that publishes solely on the Internet is much more credible than, say, the New York Times despite the latter's age and standards.
How is this any different from paper? Somebody posting on a blog is precisely the same as a drunk homeless guy handling out leaflets on a street corner. There's no need to criticize user-created content because some users are crazy, incompetent, or hostile.
The internet has yet to be fully contained, so the brilliant, the base, and the bought-off are all mingling still.
Perhaps, yes.
...As a result from the historical credibility and assumed rigor of certain mediums (i.e. books published by reputable publishing houses and authors).
This right here is why I wasn't sure whether or not to use the word "rigorous." I can agree with you 100% that rigor, in the most base sense is only really attained in certain academic journals, and most other popular publications lack intellectual rigor. But what I'm talking about are general stringent standards; a gossip magazine could be just as "rigorous" as an academic journal - the only difference being the type of standards it seeks to employ. For instance, if the gossip magazine is committed to giving the most complete coverage of, say, the latest pants Paris Hilton is wearing, they are going to employ stringent standards that will give the magazine the best possible result: have the latest and most expansive information and coverage about those pants.
If, for instance, this gossip magazine ended up publishing something that was about...oh, I don't know, a commentary on the Brazilian Communist Party's land use policies, they wouldn't be living up to their own stringent standards. In essence, they would be betraying the readers by straying away from their established realm of expertise ( or genre), and as a result, their credibility would suffer. Which would lead fashionistas who must know the latest about Hilton's pants to choose another magazine, one which didn't examine the BCP's land use policies.
I'd say that the lack of accuracy in popular newspapers regarding math and science has to do with what I mentioned above. Namely, certain publications have areas of expertise, coverage, or focus. When they publish information regarding those areas of which they have expertise in, such publications will almost always endeavour to appease their readership as much as possible. Academic journals will want to be as robust, accurate, and intellectually rigorous as possible; gossip magazines will want to be as thorough in their coverage of gossip as possible.
Yes, there is. You said it yourself in your post, people are more likely to believe a book than a page on the internet. There's an assumed greater credibility in certain mediums when compared to others. The ones with greater credibility tend to be older, and the assumption is usually based on notable historical examples of credibility - when one thinks of newspapers, what comes to mind? The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, the Guardian, all of these are rather famous newspapers, all of which have shittonnes of credibility, and as a result, they are able to "lend" this enormous credibility they have accumulated to other papers in the same medium - purely because the NYTimes, Globe/Mail, and Guardian all happen to be newspapers. It's guilt by association, really.
Two things. First, it takes a lot of money to make your street corner publication look anything near professional, let alone credible. You can publish leaflets all you want, but people are still giong to identify them as leaflets - if, on the otherhand, you were publishing papers that looked as snazzy and as professional as the Guardian, then you might be on to something. Second, user-created content is dominated by unaccountable actors, rather than institutions or organizations. I don't really know how to explain it, because I haven't thought it through totally, but there seems to be an issue insofar as institutions seem to tend toward rigor more readily than individuals. I'm not sure why, but if that is true, then it becomes a lot harder to actually evaluate the accuracy or rigor or credibility of user generated content when compared to "traditional media," which is usually the realm of institutions or organizations, most of which have stringent vetting processes.
As for Gossip Magazines: Look up Batboy.
People are more likely to believe a book, but that does not mean the book is more likely to contain correct information. I distrust newspapers completely. The few articles they publish in my area of expertise, computer programming, are generally filled with misunderstandings or outright factual inaccuracies. Since they can't be bothered to perform even rudimentary fact-checking there, I do not think they perform any in other areas -- such as politics or finance.
People haven't learned how to identify professional web pages yet, but that will change as younger generations more familiar with the web grow up. It's also changing on opposite end, as printing tools once reserved for pros become available to the public. It's easy enough today to lay out a document in Scribus, export to PDF, and print up a couple hundred runs at the local copyshack.
The difference is that if I'm printing a newspaper, people assume from the start that it contains true information (rightly or not), and it takes some time before the general populace realizes when a newspaper is printing errors. In contrast, internet sources start at zero credibility, and it takes months or years before they become accepted. This credibility can be lost easily, because there are dozens of hungry competitors just waiting to become the next <whatever>.com. Internet publishers are not unaccountable, their accountability is just measured by a different meter. Instead of being reprimanded or fired, their mind-share is destroyed and they must start over from scratch.
This process means that a site will be one of three types:
1) Unknown without cited sources. Can be safely ignored.
2) Unknown, with cited sources. Credibility depends entirely on the sources, which are ideally peer-reviewed journals or a well-known site.
3) Known sites, that people understand to print true information (sometimes within a limited domain).
This is not new, it's the exact same requirement of printed media in general, but now there's no money changing hands so suddenly people are freaking out.
Guy is arguing an entire country was "converted" to objectivism? Dude is clearly a crackpot. Why is there any value in making a critique of shit like this? It's akin to analyzing Timecube.
This is an easy choice to make. A harder choice is to decide whether an expert is qualified or not. My suspicion is that improving communications technology will improve a persons odds of getting good information. This just seems far more likely than the alternative. This isn't to say there won't be ups and downs. People will game the system. People will respond with technologies and institutions that protect against system gaming and so forth and so on. Peer review is a classic case of a culture/technology aimed at avoiding getting suckered (although it isn't perfect as was famously pointed out by some witty MIT--I think--kids).
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Bill Bishop's The Big Sort exhaustively covers how this phenomenon has affected the last fifty years' worth of American politics.
I think he's talking about Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and self-described Objectivist.