My Curious Life

Andrew Keen released his controversial The Cult of the Amateur book on the world this past week, then followed it up with a ChangeThis manifesto that proved to be equally brash and, in my opinion, extremist. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels that Keen is doing this for effect (and book sales).

Keen argues that by making everyone an author of content, we will drown in a sea of mediocrity and bring an untimely “death of traditional mass culture”. He predicts the disappearance of big media as individuals essentially trade mainstream media for democratized content published by throngs of amateurs, resulting in the “disappearance of shared cultural understanding and experience.”

While I am by no means an expert at media trends and consumer consumption of the media, I find Keen’s arguments to be very ineffectual, sounding more like something one would expect from the media giants who are struggling right now to adapt, rather than as a rational analysis of media and its future.

It seems to me that in the past, popular culture has been molded by a limited and selective set of media produced by large corporations who tried to target the largest possible audience. This was a direct result of the need for special skills or training and the cost of production being so high.

As the internet has exploded and lowered these barriers for an ever greater number of media producers, the range of possible audiences has increased dramatically. This seems to be one factor that Keen misses … the notion of expansion of culture and audience, rather than contraction. In addition to larger, more expensive and expansive media productions like movies and television, new audiences of varying sizes have sprung up around specific topics or interests and any number of other factors in a multitude of combinations. These new audiences are subsets of the larger culture, with their own additional shared media experiences and cultural references.

Look at all of the email, blog and video sharing of things that capture our attention and interest … commercials, videos of a kid with a lightsaber, stupid email jokes and horrible chain letters. These are new cultural artifacts and references that we share, and they hold just as much significance and relevance as a blockbuster movie or top ten single.

I would expect that as traditional media adapts to this new and changing audience makeup, large media outlets will begin to focus on the things that they do best … entertaining and informing via channels that are better served by large budgets and dipping into the professional talent pool and ever-expanding pool of amateur talent to produce mega-blockbusters and cultural icons. At the same time, semi-pro and amateur producers will continue to fill in the gaps, producing smaller and more targeted productions for the varied niche audiences.

To survive these changes, big media needs to reconnect with its audiences (yes, there are more than one) and start following their interests more closely, perhaps even grooming more amateur and semi-pro talent and watching where it goes. If something semi-pro or amateur takes off, throw those big budgets and Hollywood muscle behind it to make something even bigger.

The whole thing boils down to the fact that the audience is no longer captive … we seek out shared cultural references and experiences on our own now, rather than waiting to have them spoon fed to us. And there are more audiences than ever, in more places than ever, which means that these shared experiences and references may overlap in strange and interesting ways with the various audiences of which we are a part.

A disappearing audience? No, I think not. Perhaps Hugh MacLeod said it best … Keen’s world may never have existed at all. I guess in that case, Keen’s work might be an interesting work of fiction that might find its own audience somewhere.

Sometimes the most innocuous things can be the stuff of great innovation. I’ve been a book lover all my life, reading more before the age of 10 than most of the people I know read by the time they were 25. For a long time, I kept a catalog of index cards with the books I owned (and hoped to own) on them.

Later, when I got my first computer (a Texas Instruments TI99/4A) I wrote a little program in BASIC to keep track of my books, but tools like that aren’t easily accessible by the masses.

Well, here we are in the Web2.0 world and along comes LibraryThing, which takes advantage of Amazon’s huge database of books, and helps you keep a virtual catalog of your library. Add in features like finding books in the libraries of others who have some books like your own, and you can imagine the fun a bibliophile can have with this thing. I’ve put a small sampling of my library into the sidebar of this blog, courtesy of LibraryThing.

Oh, and I have to give a shout out to a woman who’s a bigger bibliophile than I’ll ever be, the TurboBookSnob. Just say Booker Prize and she’s all over it.