Keen’s hatred of a talentless sea swamping out the qualified experts tempts him to say ridiculous things. ‘Our trust in conventional advertising’, he says, is being ‘compromised’ by spoof advertisements on the internet. What trust in conventional advertising? Then, for Keen, talent should be nurtured by ‘traditional’ talent scouts, agents, publicists and marketers. Internet copying, he says, is destroying the ‘sanctity of authorship’, whatever that is. In his view, a competition for amateur video-makers to produce advertisements for Doritos corn chips is ‘undercutting the work of traditional advertising agencies’.
It is perfectly true, as he points out, that newspapers are at last in trouble because advertising is going to the internet. But newspapers had better adapt. Either they must find a way of doing without the ‘traditional’ advertisement revenue, or they embrace the bells and whistles of the internet. Keen praises the Guardian for setting up an internationally popular website. But, since I am sitting in the middle of it, I can’t help thinking that the Telegraph media group has stolen a march on its competitors by beginning to build up a truly integrated internet (including video) enterprise.
Andrew Keen makes his argument clear without clogging his prose with the baffling jargon of HTML, URL, RSS and folksonomies. But it is hard to agree with the blurb that this is a ‘beautifully written’ book. It is not just that he keeps referring to people in the form: ‘Stanford law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig’. Nor that he attributes clichéd thoughts to unconvincing authorities: ‘As former British Prime Minister James Callaghan said, “A lie can make its way around the world before the truth can put its boots on”.’ His whole book is repetitive and flaccid, like a dismembered octopus.
He is right to loathe ignorance and cultural poverty, but the internet need not impose these, any more than the telephone. The answer is not, as he suggests, to draft in ‘experts’ to police the set-up. Rather, we must first inculcate strong cultural virtues and then use the internet with discrimination. You may practise the antique arts of calligraphy, heraldry, falconry, sonnetry, polyphony or venery, and still benefit from the internet.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.