This Book is NOT about the Net

My latest Forbes column takes a look at Andrew Keen’s latest book, Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. It’s an interesting book, and a much better one than his previous screed, Cult of the Amateur. Andrew raises valid concerns about the sheer volume of over-sharing taking place online today. As I note in my review:

Keen is on solid ground when outlining the many downsides of over-sharing, beginning with the privacy and reputational consequences for each of us. “Social media is the confessional novel that we are not only all writing but also collectively publishing for everyone else to read,” he says. That can be a problem because the Internet has a very long memory. A youngster’s silly pranks or soul-searching self-revelations may seem like a fun thing to upload when such juvenile antics or angst will win praise (and plenty of pageviews) from teen peers. Your 34-year-old self, however, will likely have a very different view of that same rant, picture, or video. Yet, that content will likely still be around for the world to see when you do reach adulthood.

And Keen offers many other reasons why we should be concerned about a world of over-sharing and “hypervisibility.” The problem is that Keen drowns out these valid concerns by assaulting the reader with layers of over-the-top pessimistic prognostications and apocalyptic rhetoric. In particular, again and again and again in the book he comes back to George Orwell and his dystopian novel, 1984. Keen insists that some sort of Orwellian catastrophe is set to befall humanity because of social media over-sharing. (See this other Forbes column on Keen’s book, “Why 1984 Is Upon Us,” to see just how far this theme can be pushed).

Interestingly, Keen is not the only person to raise the specter of Orwell’s “Big Brother” nightmare in an Internet policy tract. Allusions to Orwell’s 1984 and “Big Brother” are increasingly common in Net policy books, blogs, essays and even newspaper articles. Variants on the “Big Brother” theme include: “Corporate Big Brother,” “Big Brother Inc.,” and even “Big Browser.” Similarly, back in 2008, a Public Knowledge analyst likened Apple’s management of applications in its iPhone App Store to an “1984 kind of total control.”

Let’s put an end to this silliness. George Orwell’s 1984 is a book about coercive, totalitarian governmental control in which citizens are forcibly and relentlessly brainwashed by an all-encompassing tyrannical Big Brother. It is a world of propaganda, censorship, historical revisionism, mind control, top-down planning, and total war.

By contrast, the modern digital devices and social media services that Keen and others repeatedly decry as “Orwellian” are nothing of the sort. First, and most obviously, they are purely voluntary. No one forces us to use Apple, Google, or Microsoft devices or any other company’s digital technologies. Likewise, no one forces us to join Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, or others social media services.These companies and countless others compete for our allegiance and try to win our business. If we do choose to use their services, we are also free to later abandon them. These are not “crystal prisons,” as this recent EFF blog post suggested (at least of Apple). These companies can’t coercively keep us in their “walled gardens,” which really aren’t all that “walled” or “closed” as I have argued here before. And while we are using those services, there is no effort by any of them to brainwash us or encourage us to take up arms against others. They are just looking to make money, not war.

To reiterate, I absolutely understand that there are very legitimate privacy and reputational concerns associated with excessive social media sharing and online living more generally. Again, Keen and others are on strong ground in raising some alarm about the perils of hypervisibility and over-sharing of personal information. But such concerns are in a totally different league than the sort of issues Orwell was raising in 1984. It’s hard for me to take seriously those Net policy authors and analysts who conflate the two.  I hope they stop.

I just finished reading through The Economist’s new 14-page special report on cloud computing, “Let It Rise” in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important:

The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.

Even if you are very familiar with cloud computing, I recommend you take a look at the article. Anyway, while I was reading it, I was unsurprised to come across some comments from Nicholas Carr, whose new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is essentially an early history of cloud computing and an investigation into its effects on our economy, culture, and society. And that also reminded me that, even though I have mentioned Carr’s book here several times since it was released earlier this year, I have failed to give it a dedicated review. And it certain deserves one because “The Big Switch” is easily one of the most important technology policy books of 2008.

One of the reasons Carr’s book will be high up on my end of the year list of best tech books has nothing to do with substance. It’s his style. Carr is one of most gifted writers in the tech policy field today. His eloquence and brilliant story-telling skills remind me of George Gilder in his prime. Carr nicely places modern developments in a historical context and relates the changes we are witnessing today to previous technological innovations and eras.

At the same time, however, Carr has also become one of the America’s leading Internet skeptics and vocal critics of techno-utopianism, as I noted in an essay a few months ago about Internet optimists and pessimists. He is, by far, the most reasonable and respected of those Net skeptics, using a measured tone when attacking those who have adopted a more pollyanna-ish, rose-colored view of the world. [For similar reasons, Carr’s “Rough Type” blog is must-reading for anyone who monitors technology policy.]

Electric Parallels

But on to the substance of the book. Carr’s thesis is that we are in the midst of “another epochal [technological] transformation” that parallels what happened with the “democratization of electricity” a century ago:

What happened to the generation of power a century ago is now happening to the processing of information. Private computer systems, built and operated by individual companies, are being supplanted by services provided by a common grid — the Internet — by centralized data-processing plants. Computing is turning into a utility, and once again the economic equations that determine the way we work and live are being rewritten. (p. 12)

“That shift,” Carr continues, “promises not only to change the nature of corporate IT departments but to shake up the entire computer industry.” (p. 13) Indeed, the “revolutionary potential of the information utility” promises to have profound implications:

In the years ahead, more and more of the information processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society — for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think — promise to be equally profound. (p. 21)

Unsurprisingly, Google is the central player in Carr’s drama because it is “a giant information utility” (p. 13) that has capitalized on the movement of so much knowledge and technology into the cloud and off of our desktops. Carr argues that “once utility services mature, the idea of getting rid of your PC will become much more attractive” (p. 80) and “We may find, twenty or so years from now, that the personal computer has become a museum piece, a reminder of a curious time when all of us where forced to be amateur computer technicians.” (p. 81)

Carr’s Critique of “Techno-Utopianism”

Part One of The Big Switch is primarily concerned with this progression of computing and IT from specialized service to mainstream utility, and I believe that most readers will find it as engrossing and enlightened as I did. But the tone and focus of Carr’s book change dramatically as Part Two opens. Whereas Carr keeps Part One fairly value- or viewpoint-neutral, Part Two is a more spirited critique of the economic and cultural consequences of “The Big Switch.”

In Part Two, he launches into his attack of the “techno-utopianism” that sometimes accompanies discussions about the implications of the Information Age and life in the cloud. “[O]ptimism is a natural response to the arrival of a powerful and mysterious new technology,” but, Carr warns, “it can blind us to more troubling portents.” And “there is reason to believe that our cybernetic meadow may be something less than a new Eden.” (p. 125)

It is here that Carr’s critique becomes familiar to those of us who follow the modern Internet policy debates. As I noted in my “Internet Optimists and Pessimists” essay, Carr is joining the ranks of other Net skeptics like Andrew Keen, Lee Siegel, and others. In my recent review of Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, I traced this strand of social criticism back to the late Neil Postman, author of the 1992 anti-technology manifesto, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.

Carr’s concerns about the consequences of cloud computing and the rise of “techno-utopianism” parallel those found in those other “pessimistic” tracts, although Carr is far more level-headed in articulating those fears. As I noted in the Siegel review, those concerns can generally be grouped as follows:

1. The Net is destroying (or at least greatly diminishing) the role of experts, authority, “truth”, and traditional societal norms and institutions. This is having (or eventually will result in) dangerous ramifications for our culture, economy, and democracy.
2. The personalization and customization that the Information Age and the Internet have spawned could have troubling ramifications for our society and culture.

Dangers of Disintermediation and the Problem with “Free”

Regarding the first of these concerns, Carr argues that “while it’s true that the reduction in production and distribution costs is bringing us many more options, it would be a mistake to leap to the conclusion that nothing will be sacrificed in the process. More choices don’t necessarily mean better choices,” he says. (p. 151) He continues:

Many cultural goods remain expensive to create or require the painstaking work of talented professionals, and it’s worth considering how the changing economics of media will affect them. Will these goods be able to find a large enough paying audience to underwrite their existence, or will they end up being crowded out of the marketplace by the proliferation of free, or easily accessible products? Even though the Internet can in theory accommodate a nearly infinite variety of information goods, that doesn’t mean that the market will be able to support all of them. Some of the most cherished creative works may not survive the transition to the Web’s teeming bazaar. (p. 151)

More specifically, Carr is worried about what “The Great Unbundling” — i.e., the radically disruptive disintermediation associated with the Internet Age — will mean for the future of “hard news,” investigative journalism, and prized forms of culture. The cross-subsidies that have supported the creation of such content are at risk, Carr fears, as the Net’s relentless drive for increased efficiency rolls like a digital wrecking ball through the old media and cultural landscape. “[T]he largest threat posed by social production won’t be to big corporations but to individual professionals — to the journalists, editors, photographers, researchers, analysts, librarians, and other information workers who can be replaced,” Carr says, by “crowdsourcing.” (p. 142)

In this way, Carr’s concerns are quite similar to those raised by Andrew Keen and others about how the Internet is potentially “killing our culture” (or at least the best of it as they would define it). But Carr extends this social critique in an important way by claiming that the problem with the emerging model of social production and “free” business models that dominate the online marketplace today is that they are built on a “sharecropper model.” The Net’s dominant giants, he argues, are reaping their riches on the back of free labor. These new sites and services “are essentially agglomerations of the creative, unpaid contributions of their members. In a twist on the old agricultural practice of sharecropping, the site owners provide the digital real estate and tools, let the members do all the work, and then harvest the economic riches.” (p. 137-8)

I have some sympathy for these arguments, especially as they have been articulated by Carr here in The Big Switch. Compared to the way other critics like Keen and Siegel have used over-the-top apocalyptic, neo-Luddite rhetoric when discussing their related concerns, Carr generally avoids such hysteria and does a better job of laying out his concerns about the Net and cloud computing in a more reasonable fashion. And there is little doubt that the Internet and social production models are placing enormous strain on many traditional professions and professionals.

I have problems with his “sharecropper” argument, however. This logic ignores the non-monetary benefits that many of us feel we extract from today’s online business models and social production processes. Most of us feel we get a lot back as part of this new value exchange. Carr is certainly correct that Google, Facebook, MySpace, and a lot of other Net middlemen are getting big and rich based on all the user-generated content flowing over their sites and systems. On the other hand, most cyber-citizens extract enormous benefits from the existence of those (mostly free and constantly improving) platforms and services. It’s a very different sort of value exchange and business model than most of us have been accustomed to in the past, but we are adjusting to it. We humans are resilient, adaptable creatures and we can usually learn to cope with such changes and find a way to use them to our advantage. It’s not all about companies getting rich; we are getting richer too, but in a different way. We have an abundance of information, culture, and communications opportunities at our disposal today that were simply unthinkable even a generation ago.

Carr and other Net skeptics certainly raise some very legitimate questions about the limitations of the “free culture” mindset, however. There are times when the net optimists really do sound like the pollyannish “utopians” that Carr claims they are. When I am reading the work of Benkler and other optimists, it sometimes comes across as techno-Rousseauian gibberish (or what Carr labels “the Internet’s liberation mythology.”) The Internet isn’t remaking man or changing human nature in any fundamental way, which is what some optimists seem to imply. Moreover, when it comes to economics, all this talk about the Long Tail being “the future of business” (Chris Anderson) and of “Wikinomics… changing everything through mass collaboration,” (Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams) goes much too far in my opinion. It’s irrational (techno-) exuberance.

On the other hand, Carr and the other pessimists occasionally go to the opposite extreme in critiquing new models of social production, open source, and other collaborative creative endeavors. Their obsession with Wikipedia is particularly curious. If one views Wikipedia and Wiki- models as supplements or compliments to traditional media and communications models and activities, then where is the harm? Most of us understand they are not perfect, but we can appreciate the benefits they bring society despite their limitations.

When it comes to the true impact of the Internet on our economy and culture, the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes staked out by optimists and pessimists. My own position in this regard might best be labeled “pragmatic optimism”: One can appreciate how much better off the Internet has made society while also recognizing that it has created new challenges that we need to think through.

Downsides of Hyper-Personalization

The other important theme developed by Carr in the second half of The Big Switch, which also runs throughout the work of other techno-pessimist tracts, is that the increased personalization and customization facilitated by the Internet is breeding dangerous anti-social attitudes and tendencies. Building on an argument first put forth by Cass Sunstein in his 2001 book Republic.com , Carr worries about the impact of the “Daily Me.” The “Daily Me” was the term Nicholas Negroponte coined in his prescient 1995 book Being Digital, to describe the new digital world he hoped would develop, filled with hyper-personalized, instantaneously-delivered content. And that’s largely the Web 2.0 world we live in today.

But Carr, Sunstein, and many other Net skeptics, refer to Negroponte’s “Daily Me” in contemptuous terms, arguing that the hyper-customization of websites and online technologies is causing extreme social “fragmentation,” “polarization,” “balkanization,” and “single-mindedness.” Carr warns:

Every time we subscribe to a blog, add a friend to our social network, categorize an email message as spam, or even choose a site from a list of search results, we are making a decision that defines, in some small way, whom we associate with and what information we pay attention to. (p. 160)

Thus, he fears, we could be “click[ing] our way to a fractured society” (p. 160) because of the “ideological amplification” (p. 164) bred by the Daily Me. There’s even the risk of increased fanaticism, radicalization, and extremism, he warns.

I have addressed this argument at length in my 2005 book, Media Myths (p. 39) but, to summarize, the fundamental problem with this logic is that it ignores the fact that, thanks to the rise of the Net, most of us are experiencing far more diverse voices and viewpoints than we ever did in the past. Sure, it is true that we also can now find our little niche groups and bunk-up with them online for extended periods, but I find it absurd to claim that we humans are less exposed to diverse viewpoints today than in the past.

Regardless, even if Carr and the other Net skeptics are correct and the Net is breeding such isolation and balkanization, what are we suppose to do about it? Should we roll back the clock to the good ol’ days? Carr doesn’t give us a straight answer. But, again, there are good reasons to question whether society was really better off in the pre-Internet days. The Analog / Scarcity Era had it’s own share of problems, beginning with the fact that it was extremely difficult for niche interests in our society to be served when media was catering to a mass audience through newspapers and broadcast stations. Certainly, the old model of media delivery had its advantages, but the drawbacks were enormous, and not just as it pertained to entertainment. Consider news: If we all weren’t home sitting in front of our TV sets at exactly 6:30 each night, then we missed our chance to hear the same three old white guys in bad suits tells us what the important news of the day was. Look, I liked Cronkite, Brinkley & Co., but I will take today’s 24/7 news cycle of instantaneous news over that old system any day of the week.

Again, there are trade-offs at work here. Things are not all roses like Net optimists would claim. The downside of an endless news cycle is that people can just find a niche news channel or program that feeds them news more closely in line with their own ideological tendencies. Moreover, there very well may be — to use Glenn Reynolds’s phrase — “An Army of Davids” out there in the blogosphere today taking on traditional media and expressing themselves however they wish, but that doesn’t automatically mean they all have something interesting to say! Even when they do, there is still a useful role played by mass media providers or “professional” media in steering news and culture. Indeed, they provide an essential editing function in terms of helping us decide what types of news or culture may be more important. I personally rely on the Wall Street Journal to help guide my investigation of what financial market news is worth exploring each week. I wouldn’t want to just set up my Google Alerts to feed me “financial news” and then trust that everything that came into my RSS reader was worth reading. In this sense, the WSJ is what I call a “trusted information intermediary” (or “old school filter” if you will) that many of us could not live without.

But that traditional intermediary editing and filtering function, which used to be total in its applicability to news and culture, is now shrinking rapdily. “Mass media” just isn’t quite as MASS-ive as it once was, and the rise of personalized “Daily Me” media and culture certainly has had something to do with that since it has allow us to filter news and culture ourselves.  But why can’t we have the best of both worlds — some old school filtering by trusted information intermediaries along with plenty of personalized filtering? In many ways, I think we have that balance today — and it is a wonderful thing. Pessimists like Carr seem to only focus on the downsides of customized media, and that’s unfortunate. Nonetheless, they are right to ask the tough questions about how long those old school filters (traditional media intermediaries) will survive if all of us flock to an extreme “Daily Me” mindset. My contention, however, is that we won’t. Most of us appreciate the balanced approach and are willing to support some — but not all — of those old intermediaries and filters.

I have far less sympathy for Carr’s argument that increased specialization and customization are breeding “fanaticism” and “radicalization.” Last time I checked, mobs weren’t rioting in the streets or rushing out to join the Nazi or Communist parties! Those knuckleheads still exist, of course, but they have always existed. And let’s not forget, it was during the age of scarcity and mass media that those movements gained traction and took control in some countries. In the Internet Age, by contrast, such extremist loonies usually get exposed and widely ridiculed. As the old saying goes, the answer to bad speech is more speech. The Internet has given it to us and helped us counter such societal extremism, even if it has simultaneously given such extremists a new soapbox to stand on and spew their hatred and stupidity. Let them spew it and we will respond! And we will marginalize them in the process. There’s just no chance some sort of mini-Hitler is going to use the Net to revive fascism and build a mass audience today.

Finally, I believe Carr makes a similar mistake when he argues that computers and the Internet are really more “technologies of control” than “technologies of emancipation.” (p. 191)  “While the Net offers people a new medium for discovering information and voicing opinions, it also provides bureaucrats with a powerful new tool for monitoring speech, identifying dissidents, and disseminating propaganda.” (p. 200)  In this sense, Carr is adopting the same pessimistic tone set forth by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu in their book Who Controls the Internet? While I agree that computers and the Net give the big bad statist bureaucrats new tools of control, I persist in my belief that these digital tools offer the masses more methods of evading and minimizing the power of government over their lives and liberties.  Again, I think it is important to put things in some historical context. In the past, governments could completely control the media and disseminate incessant propaganda. It is far more difficult for them to get away with that today, and citizens have many tools and outlets at their disposal to respond.  Digital technologies really are technologies of emancipation, but we can’t expect them to break the backs of the statist thugs overnight.

Conclusion

Carr’s pessimism on the two issues discussed above is succinctly captured on pg. 167 of his book when he argues that:

it’s clear that two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists — that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding — should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.

That almost perfectly delineates the battle lines in the great debate taking place today between Internet optimists and pessimists. The Big Switch probably makes the best case for the pessimists that has been penned thus far, and for that reason alone it deserves your attention. However, I continue to remain cautiously optimistic that the Net is moving our economy, culture, and society in a better direction — at least compared to a past, which had its own share of drawbacks and problems.

P.S. If you are interested in the ongoing debate about cloud computing — and specifically the question of how much competition we can expect going forward — you’ll definitely want to check out this very interesting discussion taking place between Hugh Macleod, Tim O’Reilly, and Nick Carr.

• “The Cloud’s Best-Kept Secret” — Hugh Macleod
• “Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” — Tim O’Reilly
• “What Tim O’Reilly gets wrong about the cloud” — Nick Carr
• “Further musings on the network effect and the cloud” — Nick Carr

Also, here’s a video of Nick Carr’s recent appearance on “The Colbert Report”:

Of the titles I included in a mega-book review about Internet optimists and pessimists that I posted here a few months ago, I mentioned Lee Siegel’s new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.  It is certainly the dourest of the recent books that have adopted a pessimistic view of the impact the Internet is having on our culture, society, and economy. Because Siegel’s book is one of the most important technology policy books of 2008, however, I decided to give it a closer look here.

Siegel’s book essentially picks up where Andrew Keen’s leaves off in Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture (2007).  I posted a two-part review of Keen’s book here last year [Part 1, Part 2], but here’s a quick taste of Keen’s take on things.  He argues “the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0” and that “our cultural standards and moral values are not all that are at stake.  Gravest of all,” Keen continues, “the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault as well.”

As I noted in my earlier “Net optimists vs. pessimists” essay, after reading Cult of the Amateur, I didn’t think anyone else could ever be quite as over-the-top and Chicken Little-ish as Keen. But after working my way through Siegel’s Against the Machine, I realized I was wrong. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

Keen and Siegel are both essentially channeling the ghost of the late Neil Postman, the one-time dean of the modern school of techno-pessimism. Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, was the first major anti-Digital Age diatribe and it remains the reigning champion of anti-technology screeds. “Information has become a form of garbage,” Postman argued, “not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems.” If left unchecked, Postman argued, America’s new technopoly — “the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology” — would destroy “the vital sources of our humanity” and lead to “a culture without a moral foundation” by undermining “certain mental processes and social relations that make human life worth living.”

Although Lee Siegel doesn’t bother citing him, he owes much to Postman’s brand of social criticism. Indeed, in large part, Siegel is simply bringing Postman’s critique of the Information Age up to date. Like Postman and Keen, Siegel is concerned about the “destructive side” of the Internet and the Information Age, which they all feel is being overlooked. Specifically, the attack these authors mount on the Information Age and the Net can be boiled down to two major themes:

1. The Net is destroying (or at least greatly diminishing) the role of experts, authority, “truth”, and traditional societal norms and institutions. This is having (or eventually will result in) dangerous ramifications for our culture, economy, and democracy.
2. The personalization and customization that the Information Age and the Internet have spawned is an unambiguously negative development for our society and culture. Moreover, in large part, the entire Web 2.0 experience is largely just about commercial interests furthering their ends.

Let’s take a closer look what Siegel says about each.

Experts, Authority, and “Truth”

Like Postman and Keen, Siegel doesn’t mix words when it comes to his contempt for the disintermediating influences of modern information technology. He is particularly concerned about the loss of “truth” and “authority” in our new environment. “Culture needs authoritative institutions like a powerful newspaper; it needs them both to protect its critical, independent spirit and to make sure that culture’s voices heard in the louder din of more powerful economic and political entities.” (p. 140-1) By empowering the masses to have more of a voice, Siegel says, “unbiased, rational, intelligent, and comprehensive news… will become less and less available.” (p. 165) “[G]iving everyone a voice,” he argues, “can also be a way to keep the most creative, intelligent, and original voices from being heard.” (p. 5)

Like many other Net skeptics, Siegel views Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, and almost all user-generated content with a combination of confusion or contempt. “[S]elf-expression is not the same thing as imagination” or art, he argues. (p. 52)  Instead, he regards the explosion of online expression as the “narcissistic” bloviation of the masses and argues it is destroying true culture and knowledge. “Under the influence of the Internet,” he says, “knowledge is withering away into information.” (p. 152) Our new age of information abundance is not worth celebrating, he says, because “information is powerlessness.” (p. 148).

One reason Siegel gets nostalgic about the age of scarcity is because elites like him — and others who were lucky enough to have access to mainstream media — had a more privileged place in the old media world.  As a social / cultural critic, he can’t be happy with all the competition he now faces in that field from the blogosphere and online media outlets.

But it’s difficult to sympathize with Siegel’s position that others should be excluded from having a voice now in an effort to preserve the old order. After all, for the past seven decades, public policy has largely been preoccupied with getting society out of the scarcity mess (even though public policy created much of that mess!) by ensuring that citizens had more choices and outlets. Now that we have more options, some people like Keen and Siegel aren’t happy about the fact that the hoi polloi have been empowered. But, even if some traditional institutions lose the dominant position they once held in society, plenty of “authoritative” and “professional” media options and outlets continue to exist. Our new Information Age simply empowers millions of other voices to join the conversation and offer alternative perspectives and input.

But Siegel also disputes what he regards as such romanticized notions of “online participation” and “personal democracy.” To him, everyone is just in it for the money. “Web 2.0 is the brainchild of businessmen,” and the “producer public” is really just a “totalized ‘consumerist’ society.”  But what about all those bloggers who (like me!) are in it for the love of the conversation and debate?  Well, says Siegel, we just don’t realize the harm we are doing by trying to have our say!  “[T]he bloggers are playing into the hands of political and financial forces that want nothing more than to see the critical, scrutinizing media disappear.” (p. 141) And as for those true believers and Net evangelists who believe that something truly exciting is happening with our new online conversation, according to Siegel, they are simply “in a mad rush to earn profits or push a fervent idealism.” (p. 25-6)

It’s difficult for me to imagine anything more insultingly stupid than those last two statements.  The insulting part about them is that Siegel is essentially telling us all to shut up!  We all need to put down our pens — or, rather, our keyboards — and understand that we are doing great harm to those journalists, institutions, or other enlightened few who are really providing the “critical, scrutinizing” function so essential for a healthy democracy and culture. It’s just blatantly elitist for Siegel to suggest that only a select few have any business sharing their views with the world, and he even acknowledges that several times in the book. But he wears that elitist tag like a badge of honor as he stares down his nose at the newly empowered masses, snorting in disgust at everything he sees.

And the stupid part about those statements above is that the vast majority of bloggers or online participants are absolutely not in it for the money, or even out to take down mainstream media. They just want to be heard. But, again, Siegel believes that what you all have to say is not worth hearing anyway.

The Supposed Perils of Personalization

Indeed, Siegel’s primary gripe with the Web 2.0 world is that while most of us appreciate the growing personalization of information and content as well as the increasingly participatory nature of the Internet, he sees that as an unmitigated evil.  “The Internet is the first social environment to serve the needs of the isolated, asocial individual.” (p. 6)  The “Daily Me” (personalized, instantaneously delivered content) that Nicholas Negroponte predicted and longed for in his prescient 1995 book Being Digital, is viewed by Siegel as nothing more that the creation of a “narcissistic culture” in which “exaggeration” and the “loudest, most outrageous, or most extreme voices sway the crowd his way; the cutest, most self-effacing, most ridiculous, or most transparently fraudulent of voices saw the crowd of voices that way.” (p. 79)  He goes so far as to refer to it as our “democracy’s fatal turn” in that, instead of “allowing individuals to create their own cultural and commercial choices,” Web 2.0 has instead created “a more potent form of homogenization.” (p. 67)

In this regard, Siegel is channeling another Net skeptic, the prolific Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School.  In his 2001 book Republic.com, Sunstein also referred to Negroponte’s “Daily Me” in contemptuous terms, saying that the hyper-customization of websites and online technologies was causing extreme social fragmentation, isolation, and alienation, and could lead to political extremism. “A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. As I said in my review of his book in Regulation magazine that year, Sunstein was essentially saying that the Internet is breeding a dangerous new creature: Anti-Democratic Man. “Group polarization is unquestionably occurring on the Internet,” he proclaimed, and it is weakening what he called the “social glue” that binds society together and provides citizens with a common “group identity.” If that continues unabated, Sunstein argued, the potential result could be nothing short of the death of deliberative democracy and the breakdown of the American system of government.

Siegel continues this line of reasoning in Against the Machine but, like Sunstein, completely fails to offer anything more than a few random anecdotes in defense of their thesis that the Net is leading to close-mindedness, homogenization, and the death of deliberative democracy. Worse yet, they also both completely fail to look at the other side of the story, which is that the Internet and Web 2.0 may be having the exact opposite effect. I made that argument in my 2005 book, Media Myths: Making Sense of the Debate over Media Ownership (p. 39):

The reality is that citizens do face an overwhelming number of media choices today, and that probably does make it somewhat more difficult for them to have “shared experiences” involving any individual news or entertainment program. But that isn’t really such a lamentable development. Government need not take steps to make sure everyone watches or listens to the same programs each night so they can all talk about them around the watercooler at work the next day. It’s just as good that everyone can discuss something different that they saw or heard the night before. And the very fact there are so many distinct media options available to citizens is better for a healthy democracy than a limited range of media options. Again, regardless of who owns what, the fact remains that we have more sources of news, communications, and entertainment than ever before in this country. Still, some media critics wax nostalgic about a mythical time — a supposed “Golden Age” of newspapers, radio, or television — when the populace was more closely linked or unified in some grand sociological sense by common reporting or programming options. But that is a stretch. The days when William Randolph Hearst dominated media, or when only three TV networks brought us our news at a set time each night, could hardly be labeled the “Golden Age” of those respective mediums. If that’s the world media critics want us to return to, then this represents, as Jonathan Knee argues, “an argument for homogeneity hiding under the pretext of diversity.”

And, indeed, that’s exactly what Siegel is proposing in his book, as Keen also does in his. They want to roll back to clock and return us to the mythical “good ‘ol days” of media. Again, when were those days? I simply cannot fathom how anyone can claim that the age of media scarcity — with its limited outlets and opportunities — was truly better than the world we find ourselves in today. As I noted in the first part of my two-part review of Keen’s book, which was entitled “Why an Age of Abundance Really is Better than an Age of Scarcity”:

What Keen doesn’t seem willing to tolerate is that when everyone has a voice, a lot more silly things are going to be said and heard. Back in the days before we all had our own soapboxes (websites, blogs, social networks, YouTube posts, etc.) we all had opinions, but we had few ways to get those opinions out. Now that the Internet has become the great leveler and given everyone the ability to be a one-person newspaper or broadcaster to the world, the dream of a more fully empowered citizenry is slowly becoming a reality. The upside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard. But the downside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard! That is, with the good comes some bad. There are wonderful contributions to culture and human communications being made by average Joes and Janes across the globe because of the Web. But let’s face it, there’s a lot of crap out there too. Cutting through the cultural clutter can been a real challenge, and even with the best search tools in the world at your disposal, it can still be difficult to find that diamond in the rough. But aren’t we better off as a society because of the opportunities now at our disposal? Isn’t an age of media and cultural abundance — warts and all — still preferable to the age of scarcity which preceded it?

I believe it is. And as I concluded in my review of Keen’s book, which seems like an equally sensible way to conclude this review of Lee Siegel’s tedious screed:

I think we are definitely better off because of this seismic shift in our communications and media environment. The human conversation is more diverse than ever before, and we have been empowered to experience the full range of culture and human creativity (for better and for worse!)

[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”]

A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: “Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists.” Here’s a list of some of the individuals and books (or other articles and blogs) that I believe epitomize these two camps of thinking:

Adherents & Their Books / Writings

And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:

Beliefs / Themes

So, what to make of this intellectual war? Who’s got the story right?

Although it will be easy for many in the blogosphere to side with the Internet optimists — and I would count myself as generally being in the optimist camp — I think the Net pessimists make many fair points about the disruptive nature of the Internet and how it forcing individuals and industries to completely reconsider the way they live their lives or organize their business affairs. Many Net optimists have a tendency to paint an excessively rosy picture of the transformative nature of the Net. In the extreme, the optimists seem to imply that the Net is somehow remaking man, altering human nature, and changing the economy only for the better. Among the Net optimists, there’s often a lot of romanticized talk of collective action / intelligence overcoming all barriers to knowledge or progress, and so on. (Sometimes I am guilty of a bit of that myself in my writing here). Net optimists need to be careful about overstating their case, especially on the economic front, and we would be wise to read the work of the Net pessimists with that criticism in mind.

The problem with the Internet pessimists, however, is that their skepticism often borders on Chicken Little-ism or outright Ludditism. I thought Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur was about as over-the-top as things could get in this regard. (See my 2-part book review here and here), but then I worked my way through Lee Siegel’s tedious screed, Against the Machine. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegel seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegel is currently a nose ahead in that race.

Nick Carr is probably the most reasonable and respected of the Net skeptics. He is an enormously gifted writer and I always enjoy reading his books, articles, and blog entries, even when I disagree with him. In The Big Switch, he makes many valid points about the downsides of the gut-wrenching changes that the Net is bringing about. Similarly, in his provocative recent Atlantic article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”, he wonders how the Net is negatively affecting our minds and attention spans. Carr also argues that the Internet economy is increasingly built on a “sharecropper” model that essentially exploits the free labor of the multitudes to make just a handful of major Net operators rich. He makes some interesting points but, ultimately, I think he overstates the problem. Most of us feel we get a lot back as part of this value exchange. Sure, Google, Facebook, and a lot of other Net middlemen are getting big and rich based on all the user-generated content flowing over their sites and systems, but we extract enormous benefits from the existence of those (mostly free and constantly improving) platforms and services.

Nonetheless, the Net pessimists (especially Carr) raise some very legitimate questions about the limitations of the “free culture” mindset. They are on stronger ground when the highlight the problems associated with online piracy, however, than when they are critiquing Wikipedia and the occasional limitations or errors of collaborative endeavors like it. But Wikipedia in particular seems to be an obsession for many of the Net pessimists, especially Carr and Keen.

It is also true, however, that Net optimists like Tapscott and Benkler sometimes make too much out of “wiki” / collective intelligence models, seemingly implying that proprietary business models, private firms, and potentially capitalism itself are passé notions. I disagree. While I think wiki / collective intelligence approaches have their place and play a vitally important role in our new digital economy, the old ways of doing things are still alive and well and producing some wonderful results. For example, “The Dark Knight” wasn’t the product of spontaneous collective action, and I still don’t see any truly compelling open source video games to compete with the likes of “Madden 2009” or “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.” I think some of the Net optimists get a bit carried away at times when the place too much faith in the “Wikipedia-ization” of everything, or the idea that the Long Tail is somehow “The Future of Business,” as the subtitle of Chris Anderson’s book suggest. I think that goes much too far. On the other hand, I am huge fan of Wiki & Long Tail models and, like most others, understand their limitations. Those models will play an increasingly important role in the Net economy moving forward whether the Net pessimists like it or not. Bottom line: each model or mode of production has its place and purpose and they will continue to co-exist going forward, albeit in serious tension at times.

Perhaps when I have more time I will return to this discussion and fill it out more with some passages and quotes from each book. I just don’t have the time right now but I will try to do so at some point in the future. Anyway, these are important books that deserve your attention if you are following the debate over the impact the Net is having — for better or worse — on our culture and economy.

In a previous essay, I critiqued Andrew Keen’s thesis that our culture was better off in the age of scarcity than it is in today’s world of media and cultural abundance. In this essay, I want to make a few comments about his latest anti-Web 2.0 rant regarding how, in addition to destroying art and culture, the age of abundance and “amateur” content creation is going to result in the death of advertising.

In an AdWeek guest editorial this week, Keen argues that:

Web 2.0 is, in truth, the very worst piece of news for the advertising industry since the birth of mass media. In the short term, the Web 2.0 hysteria marks the end of the golden age of advertising; in the long term, it might even mark the end of advertising itself.

[…]

[F]or the advertiser, media content is indeed losing its value, a value historically derived from its scarcity. This devaluation of media isn’t hard to quantify: It can be measured everywhere, in falling CPM and the failure of social networks to develop viable business models. No new technology—neither the false dawn of mobile, nor the holy grail of personalized, targeted advertising—is going to save the advertising business now. No, the truth is that advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity. That means less user-generated content and more professionally created information and entertainment, less technology and more creativity. The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.

Oh my, where to begin…

Well, Keen is right about one thing (and only one thing) here: The end of the age of scarcity is certainly shaking up the advertising world. Bob Garfield of Ad Age wrote an interesting set of articles on this issue recently under the title “Chaos Scenario.” (Part 1 and Part 2.) When Bob called me for a comment for Part 2 of that series, here’s what I told him:

“It’s a very different kind of world. The problem is, the expectations are there to capture that mass audience that long ago disappeared. We are witnessing the gradual death of the business models that thrived in that age of scarcity.”

So, in a sense, I agree with Keen that the death of scarcity will challenge traditional advertising arrangements and media business models. Unlike Keen, however, I am not Chicken Little-ish in my outlook of things and I certainly do not believe that the end of scarcity “might even mark the end of advertising itself.” Just because media and advertising are changing doesn’t mean they are dying. They are just evolving. As John Gartner of the Marketing Shift blog notes, “Advertising won’t die. But it will never be the same.”

Indeed, there are some incredibly innovative advertising strategies being developed today in response to the changing nature of media development, distribution, and consumption. For example, I knew the world had changed in a major way when a friend sent me the link to the latest Geico ad that had been posted on YouTube and I spent the next twenty minutes watching a whole batch of new and old Geico ads. [I don’t know who developed those ads, but they deserve a raise! Brilliant stuff.] But I’ve also found myself watching ads in other strange places lately. The Microsoft XBox 360 Marketplace, for example, has many ads and promo clips that I find myself viewing regularly. And yes, I’ve even clicked on a few ads I’ve found on my mobile phone.

But Keen doesn’t seem willing to acknowledge that such innovative changes are occurring or that they might be a perfectly healthy evolution of the marketplace. Instead, he makes the preposterous argument that “advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity” and that “The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.”

There are times when I am reading Keen’s book and articles like this and I find myself wondering: Does he really believe this stuff, or is he just a savvy idea marketer who understands that the best way to sell books its to be more over-the-top than the last guy?

Sadly, Keen seems to be a true believer in the Coming Cultural End Times and the collapse of all things once sacred (at least that which he holds sacred). As I pointed out in my previous essay about Keen, his view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. Indeed, he is the living embodiment of what Virgina Postrel calls “the stasis mentality.”

Keen’s work really got me thinking about Virginia Postrel’s wonderful book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, which is now almost ten years old. In her book, Postrel paints a brilliant picture of how many debates about technology and progress will unfold in the future. She contrasts stasis thinking with dynamism, and her work is worth quoting extensively here because it perfectly unlocks the mystery behind Keen’s thinking:

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis—a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism—a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition? Do we value stability and control, or evolution and learning? Do we declare with Appelo that “we’re scared of the future” and join Adams in decrying technology as “a killing thing”? Or do we see technology as an expression of human creativity and the future as inviting? Do we think that progress requires a central blueprint, or do we see it as a decentralized, evolutionary process? Do we consider mistakes permanent disasters, or the correctable by-products of experimentation? Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape. The central question of our time is what to do about the future. And that question creates a deep divide.

Indeed it does, and that is the divide that now exists between Andrew Keen and most of the rest of us who have fully embraced (or at least learned to cope with) the sweeping changes brought about by the rise of the Internet, user-generated content, and “amateur” culture in general. No doubt, as Keen suggests, disintermediation has been a destabilizing force. The death of scarcity and the rise of abundance have shaken up the old order. But it is not all for the worse. While the creative destruction of the capitalist marketplace is always difficult, in the long run, it typically brings about better business models and modes of thinking.

But Keen wants to wind back the clock and “re-create scarcity” to save traditional business models. How would that even work? He never seems to get around to providing clear answers to that question, and for good reason: It would likely be incredibly intrusive and destructive. Virginia Postrel perfectly identified the logical implications of the stasis mentality that Keen represents when she wrote:

Stasist social criticism… brings up the specifics of life only to sneer at or bash them. Critics assume that readers will share their attitudes and will see contemporary life as a problem demanding immediate action by the powerful and wise. This relentlessly hostile view of how we live, and how we may come to live, is distorted and dangerous. It overvalues the tastes of an articulate elite, compares the real world of trade-offs to fantasies of utopia, omits important details and connections, and confuses temporary growing pains with permanent catastrophes. It demoralizes and devalues the creative minds on whom our future depends. And it encourages the coercive use of political power to wipe out choice, forbid experimentation, short-circuit feedback, and trammel progress.

And therein lies the ultimate danger of the stasis mindset that Keen embodies: It isn’t just silly, it’s downright destructive and a significant threat to our liberties.

Andrew Keen is the web’s favorite whipping boy these days, and in some ways he has it coming. His latest book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, is an anti-all-things-Web 2.0 screed. Keen lambastes “Internet democracy” (specifically the Wiki model of collaborative creation) and decries the rising tide of user-generated everything. When you get right down to it, Keen’s view of the world is unapologetically techno-conservative and culturally elitist. He’s angry that there are fewer intermediaries minding the culture. As a result, he argues, “professional” media (by which he means to say “better” media) is giving way to “amateur” media (which he regards as synonymous with, well… crap).

Unsurprisingly, the blogosphere has fought back with a vengeance and called Keen every nasty name in the book. But the best and most level-headed critique of Keen’s work is still this old essay by the ever-insightful Clay Shirky. Clay’s response rightly concedes that Keen in correct in pointing out that some important things have been lost with the rise of the Internet. There certainly are fewer intermediaries filtering our culture for us, and that will sound like a great thing to many of us. But it’s important to realize that some of those mediating forces serve a valuable role. Editors, for example, play an important, but often overlooked, role in terms of improving the quality of great deal of media content of all varieties (journalism, books, movies, music, etc). The blogosphere is becoming an editor-free zone, and at times it really shows. There are times when some particularly insulting things are said or silly mistakes are made that probably would have been corrected had a good editor been responsible for overseeing the final product.

On the other hand, the unfiltered Web 2.0 experience is wonderfully refreshing. Sometimes it’s nice to see what the uninhibited exchange of ideas results in. Regardless, the bottom line is that the editing profession (broadly defined) is changing because of the Internet. That is undeniable. And other mediating forces or institutions are seeing their power or relative importance in the cultural creation process diminished as the Internet-spawned disintermediation continues unabated.

Will that create short term problems? Undeniably. But Keen thinks these developments are contributing to a sort of cultural catastrophe and that we are collectively much worse off because of this disintermediation and empowerment of the “amateur.” This goes much too far in my opinion.

What Keen doesn’t seem willing to tolerate is that when everyone has a voice, a lot more silly things are going to be said and heard. Back in the days before we all had our own soapboxes (websites, blogs, social networks, YouTube posts, etc.) we all had opinions, but we had few ways to get those opinions out. Now that the Internet has become the great leveler and given everyone the ability to be a one-person newspaper or broadcaster to the world, the dream of a more fully empowered citizenry is slowly becoming a reality. The upside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard. But the downside is that everyone gets an equal chance to be heard! That is, with the good comes some bad. There are wonderful contributions to culture and human communications being made by average Joes and Janes across the globe because of the Web. But let’s face it, there’s a lot of crap out there too. Cutting through the cultural clutter can been a real challenge, and even with the best search tools in the world at your disposal, it can still be difficult to find that diamond in the rough.

But aren’t we better off as a society because of the opportunities now at our disposal? Isn’t an age of media and cultural abundance–warts and all–still preferable to the age of scarcity which preceded it? Think about the big picture. As I pointed out in my recent City Journal essay on “The Media Cornucopia”:

Throughout most of history, humans lived in a state of extreme information poverty. News traveled slowly, field to field, village to village. Even with the printing press’s advent, information spread at a snail’s pace. Few knew how to find printed materials, assuming that they even knew how to read. Today, by contrast, we live in a world of unprecedented media abundance that once would have been the stuff of science-fiction novels. We can increasingly obtain and consume whatever media we want, wherever and whenever we want: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the bewildering variety of material available on the Internet.

I think we are definitely better off because of this seismic shift in our communications and media environment. The human conversation is more diverse than ever before, and we have been empowered to experience the full range of culture and human creativity (for better and for worse!)

Moreover, the old mediating institutions aren’t dead yet. There are still plenty of large-scale media operations and content creators / editors that are alive and well producing a wide variety of culture. It’s just that they now face a lot more competition than ever before, and from sources of a very different nature (small-scale, independent, and wonderfully “amateur-ish.”)

Finally, let’s not forget that the age of scarcity and mediated culture that Keen seems to put on pedestal created a lot of crap too! Sure, the Internet era gave us Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and plenty of pathetic, time-wasting YouTube videos. But the age of media “professionalism” gave us “Three’s Company,” the Bay City Rollers, and “Killer Klowns from Outer Space.” Each era produced its fair share of quality and crap. There’s just more of both these days and that’s what Keen doesn’t seem willing to accept. But I’ll take that deal any day over the limited choices of the bygone scarcity era he seems eager to reestablish.

[Note: Part 2 of this essay can be found here.]