The Cult of the Amateur is a broadside attack on Web 2.0, a term we may hastily define here as that growing sector of the internet which serves mainly as a platform for user-generated content, including sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Typepad, Blogger and YouTube. The main thrust of his argument is that all this home-made content - blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music - is an inadequate replacement for mainstream media. It may be a harmless, even occasionally enriching addition, but we can't have both, because the former is swiftly killing off the latter. Thanks to Web 2.0, newspapers, record companies, movie studios and traditional publishers are on the verge of extinction, he says.And then today in Salon, Gary Kamiya has this to say:
I think the basic problem with all of this is this unfounded assertion that bloggers are rebellious adolescents raging against the publishing machine, when the truth is most bloggers are just taking the opportunity to participate in the larger world the internet has to offer. Most of the blogs I read are pretty thoughtful, and even if they are self-edited, the writer does take the time to refine his or her thoughts.In any case, real editing is something different. It takes place before a piece ever sees the light of day -- and it's this kind of painstaking, word-by-word editing that so much online writing needs. If learning how to be edited is a form of growing up, much of the blogosphere still seems to be in adolescence, loudly affirming its identity and raging against authority. But teenagers eventually realize that authority is not as tyrannical and unhip as they once thought. It's edited prose, with its points sharpened by another, that will ultimately stand the test of time. There is a place for mayfly commentary, which buzzes about and dies in a day. But we don't want to get to the point where the mayflies and mosquitoes are so thick that we can't breathe or think.
The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.
Second, is the false claim that all of this fabulous edited content is in fact producing violin makers instead of just legitimizing the schlock that the business side wants to publish to increase sales. From what I can tell most successful writers like Rowling and King go unedited (and their later books get longer and longer as a result). More importantly where are the gatekeepers when false memoirs and celebrity trash routinely race up the sales charts. The whole pretense is a sham.
So what they claim is a necessary function is actually just a lot of self-mythologizing and posturing on the part of professional writers and editors who can't stand to see their livelihoods de-professionalized. But the truth is that we are only at the dawn of the prosumer era. Just wait until the amateurs are producing their own albums, their own novels, their own movies and sharing them via the internet. Just wait until there is no difference between Random House and some guy's blog. Then take another leap forward to when individuals are designing their own vacuum cleaners, their own clothes, their own cars, and replication technology allows us to completely eliminate manufacturing and industry in the name of the hand-designed, the hand-made. Download the plans and set your replicator, and voila: a violin.
The point that's being missed is that blogging like anything else takes time to be developed and refined. We are only at the beginning, and we don't yet know what's good, or who does it best. If this were the 1500s we might be complaining about the endless reams of paper given to the amateurish writing of sonnets which was the fad of the time. Everyone, regardless of talent, was toiling away on sonnets. Most of them aren't worth reading, but does that mean we should also dismiss the one's scribbled down by Shakespeare? Of course not.
The other curious thing about all of this is the fact that most people seem to be pretty happy with the YouTube debate format that CNN used last night. So what's it to be? Democracy or self-preservation?
