The Cult of the Amateur

Context:

The infinite monkey theorem states that: ‘ a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare’.

•••

‘The Cult of the Amateur’ is the title of a book written by Andrew Keen with the subtitle ‘How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy.’  [13]

Keen defines an amateur as: ‘a hobbyist, knowledgeable or otherwise, someone who does not make a living from his or her field of interest, a layperson, lacking credentials, a dabbler.’  By contrast, the mark of a professional is: ‘a significant investment of one’s life in education and training, countless auditions or entrance and certifying exams, and commitment to a career of hard work and long hours.’  Keen argues that professional expertise is needed ‘to help us sift through what’s important and what’s not, what is credible from what is unreliable, what is worth spending our time on as opposed to the white noise that can be safely ignored.’  This expertise is traditionally provided by a hierarchy of paid editors, publishers, agents, scholars, critics, and others who act as cultural ‘gatekeepers’ to knowledge.  Keen’s message is that Web 2.0 technology is flattening this hierarchy, throwing such people out of work, ‘corrupting and confusing popular opinion’, and creating an ‘endless digital forest of mediocrity.’   Citing Huxley’s Infinite Monkey Theorem (above), he laments the popularity of Wikipedia as: ‘the blind leading the blind - infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.’ [13]

There is need for serious debate about whether the creation and infusion of knowledge in society is best done through an institutional or an open, democratic approach. The Cult of the Amateur is an important topic, but Keen’s book doesn’t give the subject the serious attention it deserves.  Past the title, the book loses any focus on the amateur; it is more a rant about the Internet as a sewer of pornography, on-line gambling, theft and triviality; its 200 pages could be compressed into a one-page blog; there is no compelling vision about what the Internet might be.  Like a medieval bishop, lashing out at the printing press and longing for the restoration of centralised control, he shows that his anti-Web 2.0 stance is actually about preserving the power and privileges of professional experts, mixed in with authoritarian moralism: ‘we need rules and regulations to help control our behaviour online … it takes government regulation to protect us from our worst instincts and most self-destructive behaviour.’ 

The problem with this debate is that the level of hype surrounding Web 2.0 and the Internet often drowns out legitimate fears and scepticism about the changes this technology is bringing, so that people like Keen are almost automatically elevated by the media as heroes when they give these fears a voice, whatever the quality of their message.  But there is a need to pause and think - this debate is highly relevant to the issues surrounding the wiki; for instance, is it possible that an open, democratic public forum facilitated by the wiki could substitute for stringent, academic peer review, and will the content on the wiki have the same legitimacy as similar work sold by an academic publishing house?  Within the RIBA and the academic community there will definitely be some strong views on this subject; these should be canvassed and addressed.

Therefore:

Don’t expect everybody to agree with all of the democratic ideals of wikis in general.  Be prepared to respond to criticism that wikis encourage amateurism.  Develop a mechanism for verifying the content of the wiki, ensuring that it is accurate and its sources are reliable.

•••

In his classic guide to court politics which was published four hundred years ago, Machiavelli, an Italian nobleman wrote: ‘Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.  Their support is indifferent partly from fear and partly because they are generally incredulous, never really trusting new things unless they have tested them by experience.’  Keen’s attack on innovation is not a new phenomenon – refer to the pattern The Participative Web.