Having read various reviews and responses to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, I had already formed the impression that I would agree with the justice of the case, but irked at his failure to be true to his own argument.

And I did, and I was. I was in sympathy with his regret for the passing of standards in writing and reporting, and for the threat to established institutions. I have a traditional education, which inclines me to value standards in reasoning and expression, and to respect expertise. I’m also trying to succeed in as a writer according to the traditional publishing model. In short, I’ve got an investment in the traditional way of doing things.

However, Keen has written a polemic, a very Web approach, exemplifying some of the practices he pillories. He employs cheap insults. He piles anecdote upon anecdote in journalistic style without – this is a scientist beef – any sense of denominator, whether this is a rare instance, or a common practice. He does not explore what other forces might have contributed to, or might actually have been causing, the decline of traditional media and authorities. Misattribution of cause is no help.

In his paen to the objectivity and quality of mainstream media, he does not acknowledge the extent to which the newsworthy is the adworthy, with editors pressured to suppress or modify stories that will threaten the advertising revenue. He does not address the issue of bias, commercial and otherwise, in the mainstream media. He does not assess his benchmark, the quality of reporting. If the misrepresentations of subjects that I know enough to review primary sources on – scientific and medical literature – is anything to go by, then the mainstream media often fail to do their topic justice.

And this isn’t the first time that Culture has been deemed under threat from the Great Unwashed. In the mid nineteenth century, it was from the “mob of scribbling women” who had the temerity not only to write, but to have their ill-educated, uninformed, crass, and embarrassing effusions widely read. As a spiritual descendent of those scribbling women, I know that “standards” are remarkably malleable when used to dismiss the works of the non-PLU (“people like us”). Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing ennumerates the ways.

I also started wondering about which way the whodunnit went. And I propose the contrarian view: The internet began with the amateurs. The culture of cheap consumerism (on the WWW) is what’s killing it.

Mainstream media has been subsidized by advertising revenue, or by government. We’ve no sense of the true costs of high quality production, whether of journalism, broadcast arts, or published information. As consumers we’ve grown accustomed to cheap mass information and cheap mass entertainment. It’s not such a big step from demanding cheap to demanding free. The media are also responsible for the culture of celebrity which feeds into the culture of self-exhibition which Keen also deplores.

Keen does not question what seems to me to the flawed business model of mainstream media, nor consider that the real constituency of mainstream media is the advertisers, not the readers/viewers; when the advertisers go elsewhere, as onto the WWW, and the readership remains, it’s irrelevant. The WWW exposed the vulnerability in this business model. It did not create it.

A great many of the practices he criticizes are an expression not so much of the Internet, but to the application of commercial and criminal practices established well before the Internet,  much less the WWW. The selling of mailing lists. Prevalent, insulting and intrusive advertising. “Customer testimonials” that are bought and paid for by the manufacturer of the product. Con-men and women and fraud artists plying their trade. (Why don’t we abandon the fashionable neoligisms like ‘phishing’ and ‘social engineering’ and call them by the old-fashioned terms. More people might just understand enough to heed the warnings).

I’m not done with this topic, but I’m going to park it for now, and go paddling!