(Nicholas Brealey Publishing, £12.99)
Gordon Brown recently described MySpace, the website on which teenagers write about themselves, as Britain's largest youth club. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook, which consists of profiles of its users' daily lives, was offered $1bn for his company last year. And this July, YouTube, home to millions of banal amateur videos, will achieve more hits in Britain than BBC Online. Just when it seemed we had emerged from the hubris of the internet bubble, the technological revolution is back. Welcome to Web 2.0.
The phrase "Web 2.0" dates from a famous Silicon Valley brainstorming session in 2004 led by Tim O'Reilly, a cultish west-coast businessman. Participants, noting the new types of organisation emerging from the wreckage of the dotcom crash, began to evangelise for a second phase of the internet boom. O'Reilly later tried to tie down what he meant. Web 2.0 was, among other things, about "trusting users as co-developers" while "leveraging the long tail through customer self-service." Put less bafflingly, first-generation internet companies tended to sell things, while Web 2.0 companies tend to help people create and share ideas and information.
Enter Andrew Keen, a British internet entrepreneur living in California whose new book, The Cult of the Amateur, witheringly criticises Web 2.0 and its acolytes. Interestingly, it was O'Reilly who originally inspired Keen's apostasy. Each year, O'Reilly runs an exclusive get-together called "FOO Camp" (short for "Friends of O'Reilly"). Keen, invited one year, describes going on a "two-day camping trip with a couple of hundred Silicon Valley utopians. Sleeping bag under my arm, rucksack on my back, I marched into camp; two days later, feeling queasy, I left an unbeliever."
Keen is not alone in his distrust of the Web 2.0 crowd. In a much-discussed essay published on the website Edge last year, digital activist Jaron Lanier rallied against "digital Maoism" and the "alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective" on the internet. And Andrew Orlowski, another British journalist living in Silicon Valley, has turned his writing for technology news site The Register into a personal crusade against people like O'Reilly and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Do we, then, have the beginnings of a second dotcom backlash? Perhaps. But even if such a movement exists, Keen makes a poor leader. His many complaints against the internet include the usual horror stories of smut, identity theft, gambling and waffle, but he focuses disproportionately on these worst excesses of the digital enthusiasts.
Keen does have two ideas we should take seriously. One concerns the "amateurs" of his title. He quotes Neil Postman, whose famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) asks which technological future should scare us most: Orwell's vision of a surveillance society or Huxley's fear of universal docility? Keen frets about both, but a third scenario worries him more: a future in which everyone participates online, while few have anything to say. He calls this a "dictatorship of idiots."
Wikipedia is the best known example of this amateurishness, and a common bugbear of Web 2.0 critics. Lanier's "digital Maoism" essay, for instance, begins with a complaint about the accuracy of his own entry (it wrongly claimed he was a film director). Just as Keen fears the marginalisation of the expert, so Lanier thinks the unthinking belief in the power of the collective "hive mind" will destroy both authorship and responsibility. This, in turn, will seriously damage our understanding of knowledge and truth.
Keen's second idea is that these same internet amateurs are denuding the public sphere. Although he doesn't quite put it like this, his argument is a post-millennial spin on the old defence of public service media. Amid all the blogger-bashing, his true admiration is for the heroes of journalism's golden age—Woodward and Bernstein, Edward R Murrow, Walter Cronkite and so on—and the institutions, like CBS, the New York Times and the BBC, that employed them.
Yet Keen's arguments are flawed. Wikipedia is a modern marvel: a giant, free encyclopedia with generally high levels of accuracy compiled entirely by volunteers. So it is with other websites cobbled together by aggregating data from their users. Yes, online amateurism has its limits. But it seems churlish to claim that a set of generally useful free websites can be the cause of so many ills. Keen's public sphere argument has more merit, and he is right to blame the internet for undermining the business models of newspapers. But blaming Wikipedia and YouTube specifically, rather than a panoply of technological change in general, makes little sense. And blaming Web 2.0 for declining journalistic standards, without also discussing tabloid journalism and commercial television, is perverse.
Given the choice, would most people swap access to today's media landscape for any other throughout history? It is not unreasonable to argue that most people would baulk at turning off their email, powering down their internet access and returning to an era of solid broadsheets and four channels. This is not to say that today's media is perfect. But the question is: how do we save the best bits of the old world when, and if, they are undermined by YouTube, bloggers and the rest.
One blogger, quoted on the Northern Irish blog Slugger O'Toole, recently provided a neat update of Marx to identify the creed of the online amateur that Keen so disparages: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to complain about it." Keen's defence of a public service conception of media is valuable, if old-fashioned. But his contrarian, scattergun analysis makes him more similar to the online amateurs than he might care to admit.
