Sunday, June 17, 2007

Bangs Head Against Wall

There are those who get it and those who don't. And then there are those who bring up images of Custer.

Guess which one Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amatuer: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture", is. Listen to his NPR interview here.

I am trying to not wander too far down this rabbit hole of new media vs. old media, but I think Jim Thompson's piece is going to cause much discussion over the next week.

Thanks Ray for pointing me to this link.

6 comments:

Grayson: Atlanta, GA said...

I don't like to comment until I've had a chance to read/listen to all the accompanying materials, and right now I'm watching Sponge Bob with Ava, so listening to utter dreariness about Internet culture, or lackthereof, will have to wait.

However... when editors and self-appointed culture guardians start wailing and gnashing of teeth, I always think of that Oasis Super Nova line, "Where were you while we were getting high?"

We all know where the fun is, where the happening shit is going down. And it's not in their newsrooms or their classrooms or their stuffy publisher's office.

They remind me of the geeks in college who were so scared of life, of living life in any way not previously prescribed by society or their parents, that they lost out on all the good times, all the kick-yo-ass bong hits, never to gain any slightly offbeat perspective in the rest of their shrivled little lives.

To papraphrase that Hunter S. quote you were wearing the other day, I'd have quit doing drugs a long time ago, but I was having way too much fun.

Apply the same sentiment to the blogosphere... I'd have quit the Internets long ago, but I'm having way too much fun.

And BTW, no geeks (of that kind) wanted around here either.

Grayson: Atlanta, GA said...

Ok, couldn't resist listening to Mr. Keen. He gives new life to "wrong on so many levels!" I mean, where do you begin with him? The main takeaway though is that to do what he wants to do, save MSM essentially, and its process of editorial control of... opinion essentially, we'd have to have massive government intervention to regulate, uh, opinion essentially. And of course the technolog that makes all this decontruction of the MSM possible. I mean MASSIVE government intervention, to the point where it would be a crime to comment anonymously on a blog, from what I can tell from the restricted little mind of Mr. Keen.

No one wants, including the marketplace, what he's trying to protect.

Throw another dino on the fire!

Sara said...

This is just reminding me of what we talked about recently, after a very insightful comment from our friend Jen when I told her about Susanah Capelouto's hostility to blogs at the APC: public broadcasting has more to lose to new media than anyone else in the MSM. And they traditionally have seen themselves as the keepers of the faith because they haven't had to answer to the bottom dollar or to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. The problem is that their ability to ignore profits and what the public wants to consume causes them to miss the boat on big media trends for a much longer period of time than the rest of the MSM, who notice right away when something is pulling their audience in a different direction. I think it's pretty clear why public radio would want to give plenty of coverage to someone like Keen who takes on the blogging hordes.

What's interesting to me is that someone who hates blogs so much has one of his own.

Amber Rhea said...

Ha!! Wow. His blog is just a laff-a-minute.

Pokerista said...

He's a self-promoting asshat. That's what I took away from the 3 minutes I could stomach of reading his blog.

Joseph said...

The guy's despair over losing our traditional "cultural gatekeepers" made me roll my eyes when I was listening on Saturday morning.

I don't think that Keen appearing on NPR implies any kind of bias on the the network's part. NPR is probably one of the best mainstream news outlets when it comes to "new" media.

Georgia Public Broadcasting may be quite another story, of course (and don't even get me started on WABE).