Amusing ourselves to death, again
Would not mind being in Manhattan this evening. In the Strand Bookstore at 7:00 p.m., when Andrew Keen will sign copies of his new book, 
Keen's got the buzz, because when it comes to blogging he's dismissive. No, make that contemptuous. "Bloggers today are forming aggregated communities of like-minded amateur journalists?.?.?.? where they congregate in self-congratulatory clusters," he says, and continues, "Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys — many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins — are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity. For today's cult of amateur monkeys can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays and novels." Ouch! Me an "exuberant monkey"? That hurts.
But it was only a matter of time before a Keen in some form or other emerged. The user-generated content craze was bound to create a backlash. What is good, though, is that Keen is sharp. He writes well and argues convincingly. Shrugging him off won't work because he's got the market for his ideas well sussed. An awful lot of media professionals are on his side because they hate what he calls the "anything goes" aspect of online publishing, and the book's subtitle, "How the Internet is killing our culture", will appeal to all those who don't understand what's happening, but feel that it's out of control and in the hands of pornographers, criminals, Islamists and teenagers.
But we have been here before. In 1985, to be precise. That was when the media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman published his marvellous book about television,
