A colleague of mine pointed our library’s staff to an LJ opinion piece by Carol Tenopir rehashing Andrew Keen’s 2007 polemic The Cult of the Amateur. That the almost immediate response came from our IT department raised my eyebrows – hmm, maybe if I read their comments I might understand why they seem so hesitant to bring our public systems up to Web 2.0 standards. But then I thought I aught to give Ms Tenopir a hearing – I remember her as one of the outspoken voices in the early adoption era of the Web in libraries.
Unfortunately, four paragraphs into her diatribe and I am ready to vomit. Some quotable phrases:
eroding the authority of expertise and threatening traditional journalists, authors, and other sources of quality information
his arguments, which resonate with librarians’ continued challenge to help users find accurate, reliable information
[quoting Keen] when advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred [and]
all that Web 2.0 really delivers is more dubious content from anonymous sources
Already I am wondering where Ms Tenopir and Mr Keen have been since the early 1980s – the U.S. news media played major cover-up roles in that country’s terrorist activities south of the border; most news articles attributed to hard-working journalists were written by the companies and/or agencies they were covering rather than by the journalists themselves; or, what about the authority and expertise behind the big generalist encyclopedias – 70% or more of the articles were written not by the contributors, but by their respective graduate students.
While Mr Keen does use some phrases and catch-words that draw me into thinking he might have something useful to say, his overall message – buyer (or reader) beware – needs to be applied to what he says and writes. The dumbing down of the culture did not start with Web 2.0 as he would like us to believe – it started with the commercialization of the Internet with the advent of image transmission. Or, maybe we should place it a bit earlier with the advent of D-K books for children. Yes, the images are wonderfully attractive, but whoever is writing and editing the text ignore accuracy.
More than once I have picked up a D-K style anatomy book, shown it to my medically-trained wife, and been quickly informed of several egregious errors. These books came out before Web 2.0. I would suggest that Web 2.0 threatens traditional authorities and publishers not by its dumbing down potential but by its rectifying potential. Nature, last summer conducted a test of correctness within several articles of Wikipedia (one Web 2.0 device that Mr Keen seems to hate) as measured against Encyclopedia Britannica, and discovered that the error rates not only were similar but also that Wikipedia was able to correct their errors within days of discovery whereas EB’s editors called the test unfair.
I am sorry Ms Tenopir’s name attached to the Keen bandwagon – but then she is writing in a traditionalist publication.
