A bunch of F*in Amateurs

I'm not sure who pays for Newsweek magazine to be delivered to my house, but it comes once a week. As mail goes I rate it just above the junky coupon magazines that fill my mailbox, but just barely. Tonight I found myself reading an article by Steven Levy in the March 26th issue entitled "Invasion of the Web Amateurs". It was a mild attack on Andrew Keen who is a staunch critic of Wikipedia, You Tube, and any other amateur/community generated media. Keen is convinced that the Internet is killing our culture. Levy summarizes Keen's argument like this "In Keen's view, sites like Wikipedia, along with blogs, YouTube and iTunes, are rapidly eroding our legacy of expert guidance in favor of a 'dictatorship of idiots.' Reliable sources of information (like Encyclopedia Britannica, your local newspaper and even your beloved newsweekly magazine) are under siege from an explosion of self-appointed writers whose collective output, charges Keen, is garbage."

One of Keen's main messages is that we must be careful of who created what we read, listen to, and watch. Anyone who isn't an expert should be silent so we can better hear the melodious sound of experts informing and entertaining us. So how do we define an expert? Can I trust Encyclopedia Britannica's writers are expert? Can I trust my local paper's writers are expert? All sources are going to have mistakes. All writers have their own agendas. And in the end I have to trust some source somewhere. The real decision is to trust or not.

Keen argues against trusting this new media, and maybe he can make a case for the old media and the so called experts being reliable, but they aren't magnitudes more reliable. And old media was more susceptible to being controlled by powerful individuals and companies. The Internet levels the playing field. There are ten so-called idiots with the facts for every one expert. My advice is listen to the idiots. Get good at determining who has the facts. Do your research. Neither idiot nor expert will put one past you.

Keen is now on my list of idiots to ignore. I'm on my way to Wikipedia to fact check all the articles he has contributed. By the way, here is a link to the Wikipedia entry on Keen and (ironically) a link to his blog.