Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

RE: Andrew Keen's Google lecture on "The Cult of The Amateur."

This video has been passed around the Web 2.0 circles and has been a topic of heated debate in the academic groups I've been talking with. My colleagues are almost unanimously anti-Keenian and call his critique of the democratization of the world wide web to be a facist attack on the popular. While I don't condone much of what Keen claims as the "better alternatives," I am a proponent of his claims on the fallacies which come along with the further democratization of the web. Google is an obvious place where these ideas would be lambasted because of their theoretical agenda -- the utopian populous controls the fate of the web -- and as such, their biased attack on Keen doesn't flush out the positives of his critique on Web 2.0. However, I want to make it clear before I begin that I disagree with Keen's pro-authoritative stance on media.

It is important to note right away that this critique of the critique is written on a blog by an author who isn't anonymous and has clear biases. I have not been paid to research truth, I have not been peer-reviewed and I don't claim to have any credentials for writing a clearly thought out essay on the problems with Web 2.0. The democratization of media through the internet medium has allowed for people like me to post my opinions and thoughts as viewed through my experience into a virtual space which can be theoretically viewed by the world. However, this simply isn't the case for my website. I am not viewed by the world and my audience is mostly limited to my friends and family.

The Web 2.0 model allows for the possibility of democratization through the internet stream, but the reality of such a model is that there are millions upon millions of videos on youtube.com and 20% of those videos receive 80% of the viewers. This is referred to as the 80/20 law, or Pareto's Principle. The possibility of democratization exists through the Web 2.0 model, but the reality is that there are still a power law distribution on this self-organizing system, just like the "old" internet.

In systems theory, we learn that the internet is modeled by Pareto's Principle. It is not a random network in a bell-curve distribution with random hubs and nodes equally distributed, but in fact a power law distribution with clear leaders in connecting to the rest of the virtual communities. Web 2.0 follows the exact same model.

In pre-Web 2.0 media, you knew where your information was coming from and would -- hopefully -- have some form of checks and balances in place to verify information. As a cynic, I can turn on FOX news and see that there is a clear agenda in place and voracious biases which rule the ridiculous farce which an established reporting team claims is news. I disagree with Keen's assessment that large news corporations -- even traditional newspapers -- are able to present their data without carrying along baggage. However, I disagree even more with the person in the audience who seemed to believe that "the teenagers now are the least credulous people." Cynical, possibly. But least credulous? The foundations of Web 2.0 is based on anecdotal beliefs and the persistence of memes through web culture. Content is profoundly muddled in the media through Web 2.0 because people question authority but base truth on mass consensus.

Authorship is a key difference between traditional media and new media. The anonymity of Web 2.0 doesn't allow for the viewer to know who has created the content and for what purpose. The content hides behind a mask of purported innocence, but could in fact be something more malicious. I am reminded of lonelygirl15 from youtube.com. Posing as a real 16 year-old, this actress and the producers who created this fictional reality convinced the world that their project was depicting a real blogger. The only difference between the produced blogger and the millions of ignored bloggers was the unconscious flocking to lonelygirl15's video posts. Did the masses assume the reality of lonelygirl15 or were they responding on some level to the production quality of the posts?

Take Wikipedia for example. Wikipedia is the most plagarized web page because it is paradigmatically assumed as instant "information." My brother had his first professional experience in catching a plagarized paper at Wabash College. When he read the student's paper, he recognized the writing as being past the student's capabilities and beyond their level of understanding the concepts described in the paper. By copying some of the text in the paper into a google search, he was lead directly to the Wikipedia entry on the topic. Why did the student go to Wikipedia if he didn't assume that the information was fact-based?

Beyond simple trust in the internet's informational validity, Lessig's dream of a utopic democratized virtual community can already be disproved through a brief analysis of the basic structure of the internet. In Web 2.0, the best content is supposed to "bubble to the top" and provide us with the ideal melting pot of creativity and content. Instead, searching for something on google only provides you with the capitalist powerhouses who are able to "game" the system and manage to put themselves at the top of your search results. Where is the rest of the content? Buried deep underneath all the muck; it can't rise to the top because it is swamped by the billions of other providers trying to peddle their version of information. I don't believe that the democratization of information through virtual communities will provide us with better content. I believe that it will still be dominated by those who have the power or resources to streamline the content, which inevitably will end up being the advertisements that Keen comments will be indistinguishable from non-ad content. Unlike Keen, I don't believe that mass media is the answer.