Blog rabble rise up against champion of traditional culture

Andrew Keen believes blogworld’s unruly masses threaten the existence of our shared traditional media culture – and he details why in his own blog posts.

Employing blogs to rail against blogging isn’t as ironic as it appears, however. Keen doesn’t attack the medium so much as he deplores its tendency to encourage narcissism in people who seem to grow louder the less they have to say.

The journalist, scholar and Internet entrepreneur also makes his case in “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture” (Currency). The book comes out Tuesday, but it’s already made a blog splash.

Keen’s comparison of bloggers to monkeys banging on typewriters elicited outrage from supporters of Web 2.0 media democratization.

BuzzMachine‘s Jeff Jarvis judged the book “talk-show prostitution” and its author “a mastodon growling against the warm wind of change.”

Jarvis also spotted “no sense of fine British irony” in the work. That’s part of the blogosphere’s problem: It’s got a defective humor gene. Posts on Keen’s personal site and The Great Seduction blog he writes for ZDNet.com show he knows how to advance serious arguments in a playful way.

When I called Keen last week in Carlsbad, Calif., where he was attending the D: All Things Digital conference, he said his satirical bent comes across more clearly in the book’s audio version.

“But you can’t win with these people,” he added. “Bloggers are the ones who lack a sense of humor.”

Keen’s not aiming his broadside at them anyway. “They’re so busy writing their blogs or arguing with each other I’m not sure they have time to read other people’s books,” he said.

Instead, he hopes to reach a mainstream audience. “We’re troubled by the fact that Google knows everything about us, we’re troubled by identity theft, we’re troubled by Internet pornography,” he said, listing what he considers evils of Web 2.0.

“I see the Internet as a mirror,” Keen added. “All of the bad things on the Internet are a reflection of the bad things in society and the bad things in us.”

The interactive Web creates an echo chamber in which consumers become both the authors of and audience for content. It also encourages intellectual-property theft that undermines the recording industry, the news business and any other sector that sells media.

The result, he fears, will be untrained, unskilled and unwise crowds unleashing a flood of worthless content that drowns a system in which expert cultural gatekeepers present worthy musicians, authors, journalists and artists to a grateful world.

“If before Twitter there was The New York Times, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which is preferable,” Keen said.

But what if most folks eventually stop updating blogs with no readers, and better tech tools emerge to uncover the best of what’s left?

Keen sees that as a solution in search of a problem, with traditional cultural gatekeepers already doing a credible (if imperfect) screening job.

He’s no Luddite, however. “I’d be the last person to suggest we should close this thing down,” Keen said. “I’ve been known late at night to look at other people’s blogs.”

In fact, he likes to see “traditional experts like doctors, university professors and responsible politicians using the Internet as a broadcasting medium” almost as much as he hates to see it become “a play lot for amateurs.”

Debating prominent Web 2.0 evangelists has given Keen hope. Some of them “understand there are dangerous implications to this flattening of media,” he said. “If they can transform mainstream media into a more interactive media, that’s great. The best solution is a mix of the two – energy and vitality meets stodgy and serious.”

Past the hype and hyperbole, that doesn’t seem like such a reactionary notion.