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A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both. -- James Madison
“When a dog bites a
man that is not news,
because it happens so often.
But if a man bites a
dog, that is news.”
- Editor John B. Bogart, New York Sun
man that is not news,
because it happens so often.
But if a man bites a
dog, that is news.”
- Editor John B. Bogart, New York Sun
About Me
Followers
forthcoming
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- Who Owns the Web?
- World of Blogging (music video)
21 comments:
Andrew Keen writes “Today’s media is shattering the world into a billion personalized truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile.” I think this is a good way to understand the phrase “flattening of our culture.” We used to live in a society where there was some sort of hierarchical structure in the media. For newspapers, there were reporters, editors, owners, etc. There is a chain and each piece has a level of respect, authority, and authenticity. There was always some sort of checks and balances going on to make sure that the information that was accessible had validity, accuracy, and truth behind it.
Now, however, because of the internet and how accessible it is and how simple it is to create websites, blogs, etc, this hierarchy is disappearing. There is no longer a need for gatekeepers. Society decides what is important to read, talk about, etc. Society also puts the information out there. There is nobody to check every fact and theory that could be found on a website. Any common person is able to create a website and develop a theory that may be completely invalid, yet other people who see, hear or read it will take it as face value. This is what Keen means by the “flattening of our culture”.
It has made everybody equal no matter what level of training you have had in a certain area of expertise. Although I am not a doctor, I have not gone through medical school, I have not even taken a college biology class, if I wanted to create a website that gave remedies for a cold, headache, anything, I could. And the scary part is that people will read it, and although some people may look me up and see that I have no training and therefore have no idea what I am talking about, there are some people that will take what I say as the truth and act upon it.
He compares the internet to Marxism, which is scarily accurate. There is a slow degradation and receding necessity for experts in todays society because on the internet everyone is an expert. In Keen's scary new future, going to med school forever could be pointless because someone "learned" how to do brain surgery by going on youtube.
With the disappearance of experts comes the disappearance of quality information. No longer will those gatekeepers be there to make sure the information the Bloggers are releasing is truthful or quality.
After this blog post I am going to go and get my captains certification, and priest certification, in under 20 mins, ONLINE! Don't believe my expertness? I'll have certificates to prove it.
Andrew Keen fears a “flattening of our culture” because of the gigantic snowball effect that is the Internet and the freedoms that come with it. Since the Internet now allows anybody to post whatever they want, there has been a fading out of intellectual hierarchies. Sooner or later, everyone will be at the same level of “expertise.” However, credentials for expertise won’t be measured by intelligence but by the willingness of the common man to post, post, and post some more about whatever they choose. Keen fear of this is quite valid. He points at a track record of “the crowd” that proves them quite unwise; citing slavery, war, and yes, Britney Spears. After seeing that track record, I’m quite scared myself.
When Keen complains about a flattening of our culture, he is complaining about the fact that the Internet has turned us into a world of amateurs, and gotten rid of experts. Sites like Wikipedia, make it so that people do not have to become experts in a given topic. However, Wikipedia shouldn't be considered a reliable source. If we put our trust into something like that, eventually all of the wrong information will be what we have, and the world will just be stupid.
For example, I sometimes go to youtube for "how to" videos when it comes to certain things, such as how to play blackjack and things like that. I'm watching this under the assumption that the person who made the video knows how to play, and is trying to teach others. But he may have been just like me, and found out from another video, or an article. Eventually the information won't be expertise.
His other, similar concern is that rather than creating great masterpieces, because of the internet there is now just an abundance of regular, average joe type creations. Youtube has made stars of untalented people, meanwhile great talents remain unknown.
The, "flattening of our culture," means that the entire culture is being brought down to the same level; a level that is simply mediocre, and not great.
The "flattening of our culture" is the effect that the Internet has on our society. Because of the Internet, we have been given the opportunity to present ourselves as experts in just about everything. The Internet has cheapened the value of true knowledge.
Now any blog that calls itself a "news site" is considered on the same level as a newspaper or magazine.
Because of this, websites have stopped reporting in some cases. It's more important to just get the content out first. It doesn't matter if everything is wrong because the Internet also allows for infinite edits.
I've seen this even firsthand at one of my internships. I was on Twitter and noticed that a band said they were being sued by Disney. I asked my editor if I should email their press people, try and get a quote and write a short article. He said no. He told me just to screencap the tweet and post it as a story on the site.
We are experiencing a flattening of our culture because no one strives to go the extra mile. If you can't get information out quickly, you'll be left behind. So the hierarchy of truth has gone completely out the window.
This flattening of our culture that Keen talks about is really more about the flattening of knowledge. Though sites like facebook and myspace are literally flattening us as a cultural group by creating a space to advertise ourselves rather than simply live our lives, the information of this "Net Generation" is flattening more every day.
With a new blog created every second of every day, more information (usually bad or false information) spills out into cyberspace at an exponential amount. Most of the people writing are "regular people" who have an opinion and in this age, there is only opinion. Most people cannot distinguish between relevant experts and their neighbor down the street and therefore issues and information simply flatten into a myriad of ideas and opinions.
The scariest part about this is that it is not the amount of expertly written information that is waning, it is the endless amount of crap piling on top of that. It has become overwhelming, and there are many people who are simply plugging their question into a search engine and taking everything as opinion at face value. We are creating the new blogs, and we are flattening our own culture.
When Keen makes mention of the flattening of our culture, what he is referring to is the truth. This can be attributed to the democratization of the Web. The web allows anyone, no matter expert, amateur, PR professional, lobbyist, politician, etc, to state their opinion and pose it as the truth. Facts are being supplemented with points of views. Information is threatened when the credentials of the people writing it are unknown. This is a scary thought because facts are supposed to be objective, however the Internet has given all types of people the ability to make facts subjective. The idea of the "noble amateur" is just a facade for uninformed distributors of information.
Andrew Keen explains this flattening of culture “as the end of the hit parade.” In today’s internet society any one person can go on the Internet and post information, blog about something they feel is “important” or change information provided on a website, Wikipedia for example. This goes to show how in today’s culture the Internet has made it easy to “flatten culture” through the deterioration of what is accurate or not through many fragmented voices and opinions. The hierarchy of expertise has been eliminated because of the Internet, and the idea of experts has been ridden. Keen states “without the nurturing of talent, there will, indeed, be no more hits, as the talent that creates them is never nourished or permitted to shine.” Today, anyone can say they know something by posting it and no one will really know if the information provided is completely accurate or not. Keen finds that idea scary, as so do I, because in reality this is the future.
To Keen, our culture is "flattening" because of all the voices in society are talking at once, giving "amateurs" the ability to be moviemakers, film-makers, authors, journalists, and other people who influence opinion on the masses, instead of those who are professionals. There is no consensus, less things for society to relate to, a lesser sense of community because of its fragmentation.
What scares Keen, and in a sense, myself, is the possibility of devaluing our culture. Keen focuses mostly on arts and their relationship to culture, but the same can be said about politics and news -- and those changes are already be easily seen.
I think that instead of one big bulge in culture, where our music and movies etc. are more centralized, our culture is a bunch of little bumps in sporadic areas. It's hard to say that people who love music or movies is less, or less valid than in the past, but it is certainly more specialized. In reading the rest of Keen's book, one can make an opinion on whether or not that's a good or bad thing entirely.
With the advent of user generated media, the playing field has become leveled. No longer should hold movie critics like A.O. Scott and Roger Ebert to a higher degree than my peers, but rather I should take their words to the same degree of seriousness as some user on Metacritc.com.
A "flattening of our culture" means a lacking of experts.
What this problematizes is the idea of accountability. When anonymous posters make slanderous remarks about politicians, pop stars, preachers, you know, people, they aren't held accountable to it. Unlike in serious journalism, with real names associated to real thoughts, where accountability is a very serious and concrete matter. What Keen is essentially describing is a sort of online anarchy. When everyone is free to lead and follow as they choose, what we're left with is self-congratulatory information impotence.
After reading these few chapters I came up with my own conclusion. We are basically all obsessed with ourselves for no reason. We put ourselves on the internet doing a countless number of things that don't really mean anything. Maybe thats not the best wording so to put it in keens terms our culture in flattening. This is happening because we all have the resources to put ourselves out there via the internet and give our opinions and reactions. The internet is now a place where we can say and “post” what we want. This is in a way ridiculous because like many other people said in their posts, we aren't experts. We may know a lot about one thing but the internet has made us think that we know all. I don't think this is going to get better and honestly I think that we will soon be at a point where we’re not even good at that one thing. We will know so little about so much that it will eventually all really loose its meaning and be irrelevant. I don't really think that I have to explain why this concept scares keen and personally myself due to the the examples that I spoke about and all the experience with the internet and its declining meaning.
In Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen touches on a lot of things that are corrupt about the Internet and about the value of truth in our society in general. Lots of things need to be questioned.
I think that the flattening of our culture pertains to a lot of things. We're deteriorating as a nation and it's no secret. We're losing touch with what's true and what's false, who is real, WHAT is real, etc. We're flattening because we're blending important lines. Celebrities have MySpace "pages". People falsify their identity and treat Wikipedia as a legitimate source.
I perceive it to scare Keen so much because it's getting harder and harder to tell who or what is a professional or an amateur. It scares him because there is no boundary for what can be put on the Internet, no way of supervision. That would scare anyone.
One aspect of the flattened culture Andrew Keen writes about in his book Cult of the Amateur is the "flattened truth" that we are living in. Keen states "one person's truth becomes as 'true' as anyone else's." Every person with a computer and Internet has the ability to make their own blog or other personalized contribution to the Internet. He makes a good point in saying that websites like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo are all "shrines for the cult of self-broadcasting" and that these sites "have become tabula rasas of our individual desires and identities." All these networking websites are really just outlets where people release information about themselves; ultimately, people are advertising themselves. All people are then subject to their own truths. "We create an on-demand, personalized version that reflects our own individual myopia. Today's media is shattering the world into a billion personalized truths, each seemingly equally valid and worthwhile." This "flattened culture" made up of our "flattened truths" is just making everyone's truths more trivial and trivial, actually negating everyone's truths.
part 1
In the beginning to The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen describes the Internet as a flattening of our culture. He does so through a fairly well known saying coined by T.H. Huxley, that says if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite amount of typewriters, they will eventually write a masterpiece.
Keen takes this idea and applies it to the 21st century by replacing the typewriters with Internet enabled computers, and the monkeys with us (the users of the Internet). In his scenario he says, “The monkeys take over.” Monkeys: infinitely typing away to infinite blogs on infinite computers, replacing every reputable sorce of information. All the while flattening our culture into one big amateuristic plane.
This scares the crap out of him. To Keen, the flattening of our culture means that every expert on every topic is replaced by people who think they know what they are talking about, but in reality are just spewing propaganda and misinformation.
What Keen means when he says "a flattening of our culture" is that everyone's opinion holds the same value. Is everyone entitled to his or her opinion? Yes, I think so. Should everyone's opinion be held at the same value? When it comes to certain topics, I don't think so. Like Ben mentioned in class today, should my or yours or anyone else's opinion about butterflies be held at the same value as the expert on butterflies who had been studying them for thirty years? I don't think an average blogger's opinion should be considered on the same level as a trained journalist. But in a country that thinks Stephen Cobert is a journalist, I almost don't think that is a reasonable expectation anymore.
The idea of a flattened culture scares Keen. People always seem to be talking about topics they are completely ignorant about. They feel comfortable doing this because there is so much nonsense floating around out there. The result as Keen says is that society is not being informed but corrupted and confused.
My post is not here anymore but it was the 10th (of 10) at around 3pm today.
It was after Peter's. It was pretty long and I got an error message when I clicked to post it, but then it showed up in the comments when I reloaded the page. I'll post a new response later but I have to go to work right now.
I GOT IT, MATT
The idea that our culture is being flattened makes perfect sense to me. Keen goes on an on about how if we are a society of amateurs then we have no experts. If there are no experts in specific fields then who can we trust? Should we really trust the amateurs who work for Wikipedia and YouTube simply because the amount of experts is declining drastically.
People are lazier and don't feel the need to know every piece of information in their field of study because of the fact that they can just look it up on Wikipedia. The flattening of our culture is shown through the fact that the information could very well be incorrect on Wikipedia but because no one contests it, it goes on unnoticed. We are becoming a society full of amateurs who are willing to accept anything that is put in front of us instead of a dynamic culture full of intelligent, opinionated experts.
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