Finally, the Destruction of Our Culture

David Schatsky | July 23, 2007, 12:27 PM

The Internet is destroying our culture, according to Andrew Keen's new book "The Cult of the Amateur." The arts, media, entertainment and information industries are doomed, he says, if current trends go unchecked. Professional scholars and their laboriously acquired expertise; industrious journalists and their commitment to accuracy and fairness; editors and publishers and their breadth of knowledge and editorial judgement; musicians, filmmakers and cultural critics with their talents and aesthetic standards--all are having their livelihoods destroyed by Web 2.0 and the tsunami of consumer-generated content it has unleashed.

Meanwhile, consumers' lives are being destroyed or diminished by addictions to online gambling and gaming, unwanted or uncontrolled exposure to online porn, digitally mediated sexual predation, and encroaching total loss of privacy.

Keen's polemic evokes for me a dark vision of an anarchic future peopled by glassy-eyed consumers tethered to Internet devices, compulsively gambling, blogging and posting videos about the minutia of their lives, adrift in a sea of consumer-generated dross.

The forces propelling us to this future include a loss of respect for expertise, intellectual and cultural authority, standards of excellence and intellectual property, all of which are the consequence of a trendy acceptance of the romantic idea of the democraticization of culture (that Keens sees rather as mob rule and lowest-common-denominatorism). That, plus the Internet's destruction of business models that involve paying for content.

How can we avert this grim destiny? Keen's suggestions hardly seem up to the task of turning the tide:
- Entrepreneurs and media execs should embrace enlightened applications of media technology that recognize the value of professionally created content, such as Joost (vs YouTube) and Citizendium (vs. Wikipedia)
- Newspapers and other besieged information and media sectors should forge strategic partnerships with online businesses (such as Yahoo's partnership with 176 daily newspapers to carry their classifieds)
- Musicians and labels should make money from sources other than albums, like concerts, ring tones and memorabilia
- Governments should enforce regulations on online gambling and should regulate social networking to protect children from predators,
- Parents should monitor and restrict kids' Internet usage

Regulation addresses some of his concerns. But the the distruction of the ecosystem of professional content--seems more driven by the raceto the bottom of consumers' instincts and taste and the inexorable march of technology than by anything that can be regulated.

What is actually at stake here? Well, there are industries, collectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars, that are in jeopardy. Beyond that, Keen believes that the destruction ofour mass culture threatens society with the potential of widening the gap between the masses and the elites, returning us to a feudal society reminiscent of the Middle Ages. He doesn't develop this idea in the book--I've heard him mention it in conferences--and logic doesn't jump out at me, so I will leave that to one side for now.

But what of the destruction of our culture? Maybe the very idea of mass culture is an ephemeral blip. National and global communications infrastructure paved the way for it in the Twentieth Century. In the preceding thousands of years, culture was either hyper-local, a creation of individuals in tribes or small geographic areas with no special training; or was the product of, and supported by, the elite, who patronized and cultivated arts and entertainment for their own pleasure. The phenomenon of high-quality media and entertainment with mass appeal and mass distribution is a relatively recent and possibly short-lived phenomenon. As is the notion of hiqh quality information and journalistic media that have national or global reach.

What if mass media--and the economic sectors that support it--implode, undermined by the decay of everything that Andrew Keen holds dear, and enabled by the technology of Internet and consumer electronics? Then serious artists, musicians, scholars and thinkers will do as they always have done: pursue the patronage of the elite (and you can't have failed to notice the swelling of their numbers). Even the decline of the news business and journalistic ethics may not be as bad as Keen fears, as being well informed doesn't seem to be have much to do with effective democracy, with studies highlighting that majorities of voters have been ignorant and wrongheaded for decades before the alleged decline in news-consumption habits. The elites will find a way of preserving the elitest media they value. Even if the Wall Street Journal goes the way of the New York Post, perhaps other elite families will stand fast or step forward to preserve the other great papers.

I wonder how concerned this country's cultural elites really are with the cultural implosion Keen foresees. After all, mass culture we have come to know in the last century or so was the prime actor in the marginalization of high culture, which never required mammoth global scale to fulfill its mission in cultural life. High culture enthusiasts may well be sitting by placidly waiting for the dust to settle so they can get on with things and assume their rightful mantle as standard bearers of the society's highest cultural and aesthetic values without having to outshout the noise generated by the high velocity big business media machine.

A silver lining?