With 'experts' like this, who needs amateurs?

Andrew Keen is one of the better known pop-critics of Web 2.0 and he is worried that the internet is creating a culture that no longer values expertise.

Keen is completely dismissive of claims by so-called "digital utopians" who he believes see in Web 2.0 the fulfillment of their Marxist, libertarian, relativist, post-modern, or counter-enlightenment philosophies. (If web 2.0 could create agreement between all of those camps that in itself would be impressive.)

Says Keen:

These enabling technologies have simply reopened America’s old wounds about the role and meaning of intellectual authority, economic privilege, social class, cultural authority, and political power. The debate about the value of social media is really a conversation about the legitimacy of our free-market meritocracy.

and:

I believe in a meritocracy in which our individual worth is valued by our professional accomplishments.

But regardless of whether or not you agree with him about meritocracy, Keen's arguments are simply not convincing on his own terms. Even if you accept his preference for traditional expertise, his analysis of the web gets it wrong on both the theoretical and the practical level.

First, the theoretical:

I argue that Web 2.0’s gatekeeper-free media—without professional fact checkers, grammarians, and publishers—is by definition less accurate, reliable, and honest than professionally edited newspapers, encyclopedias, or books.

There are a couple of things worth noting about that statement. First, the claim that we now live in a gatekeeper-free media environment is controversial. Sure, everyone can publish their views, but not everyone's views are heard equally. Google is a new kind of gatekeeper, but Keen doesn't bother to consider what this means for his argument.

Second, I take issue with the claim that today's media environment should be viewed as, by definition, less accurate, reliable, and honest than our pre-2.0 media.

Personal blogs, Twitter, and Wikipedia exist in a media environment alongside traditional sources of "expert" information like The New York Times. Keen refers multiple times to Harvard professors whom he trusts more than anonymous teenagers. But the web has empowered the Harvard professor every bit as much as it has everyone else. (He admits as much towards the end of the article.)

The question, then, is whether an information environment containing both traditional experts and amateurs is intrinsically worse than an information environment that contains only the former.

I argue that it is not.

In practice, Keen is concerned that all the amateurism of web 2.0 is keeping us from finding quality expert content:

We really are all journalists and writers and filmmakers now—which means, in practice, that genuinely valuable journalism and writing get lost in all the self-authored junk on the internet.

But this statement isn't borne out by the literature on the structure and organization of the web. If anything, it's the self-authored "junk" that gets lost in the process of organizing content through search and through link patterns, which follow a winner-take-all power-law distribution. (Expert analysis on this topic here here and here.)

In fact, it's never been easier to find expert content. Universities are making their courses available for free online and professors from all over the world are blogging.

Thanks to the web, we are living in the age of Public Intellectual 2.0.

But Keen seems content to ignore the fact that amateur expression lives alongside of expert content, and that the web makes it easier, not harder, to find experts.

He'd prefer to exist in his own narrative in which he stands for the preservation of quality, culture, and intellectualism.

And that's fine. Thanks to Web 2.0 he can publish all he wants.

But given how easy it is to find more serious (and, yes, more expert) analysis of the way the web really works, I won't be adding Andrew Keen to my RSS reader any time soon.