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I have a love, hate relationship with so-called New Media. The hate portion of it is centered around our general sense of self-righteousness and unwillingness to see that we are as much a part of traditional media as we are a strong departure from it.

Today, however, I want to speak about my love of New Media. Why? Because of Andrew Keen, author of Cult Of The Amateur.

Mr. Keen’s book takes a stab at the entire industry of User Generated Content from blogs to YouTube. His argument is that those of us in the business of creating content outside of traditional journalism rarely if ever produce anything of cultural relevance. What we generate, he asserts, is usually some mixture of lies, low-brow self-aggrandizement or just plain junk media.

The Sky Is Falling

“It’s ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.” This is one of many lurid descriptions he uses in his book to describe Web 2.0. It’s a great line for selling a few more books and raising the heckles of us New Media types, but it’s bad logic. On top of this, he also implies that New Media is responsible for the destruction of intellectual property, with the music industry being one of his prime examples.

Honestly, I am not sure where to begin. While I can almost understand the fear that fuels this scalding polemic, what bothers me is the implication that real people, without professional license, can’t be counted on to create culturally relevant content.

Without going too deeply into the past, history would seem to prove Mr. Keen wrong. Professional Media as we know it is only a few centuries old. Before that, news was produced quite a bit like blogs are produced today. The only difference was that the scale was smaller and the means of production were harder to come by.

To say that some of what is produced online is false is a trivial argument at best. All that means is that the way people consume media has to evolve. Instead of blindly accepting the often biased words of a journalist (which is a bad idea no matter how you slice it), now we must dig a little deeper into the news to make certain that what we are seeing is the clearest picture available.

This is one of the best changes to happen to Media as a whole in a long time.

The Fiction Of Independence

Remember that no matter how independent news source claims to be, they are still businesses at their core. The job of professional news writers is to inform and to entertain, they do this by using biases as seasoning for their facts.

New Media accepts this premise as true and instead of just hoping that the news we are fed is “mostly correct,” attempts to provide other perspectives. It seems pretty clear to me that the more perspectives that are available on a subject matter, the better. There is both truth and fiction on the web, just like there is truth and fiction amongst the “gate-keepers.” As consumers of information it has always been our responsibility to take the time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

As for User Generated Content destroying intellectual property, this is laughable. The Internet destroyed or is destroying all industries that rely exclusively on limited distribution channels for their survival.

Whether it is music, movies or software, smart companies understand that the point of their existence now is to provide value outside of the of the content itself. This isn’t a bad thing. Just as mobile phones changed the way telephone companies operate the web is changing the way that content producers monetize. The economy is evolving, not degenerating as Mr. Keen would like is to believe.

Web 2.0 Roundup

The world is changing, that much I would agree. Economies are shifting, that goes without saying. Culture is being guided by new sources, again this goes without question. My argument with Mr. Keen is why this is such a bad thing. Take some time out to either read the book or do a bit of research then tell me what you think.

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