Akkam’s Razor

Josh Porter starts off a post titled "Cult of the Pundit" at Bokardo with the following italicized quote:

When are we going to acknowledge that millions of people writing poorly (while slowly improving) is better than millions of people doing the alternative…not writing at all?

I have grown tired of the "Cult of the Amateur" argument as well.  It doesn't matter, in the end, if the product created by the amateur is crap.  The fact that they undertook a new venture, sacrificed their ego by sharing it publicly, learned new skills, and likely made connections to new people, benefits all of us as a society.  It benefits individuals, families, communities,corportations, nations, and industries.  In my opinion, these are the kinds of things that can only be developed through an active internal journey of discovery, not passively from the couch.  The problems we're likely to be facing in the future are going to require creativity and imagination, things that the workplace, educational institutions, and the media have beaten out of us (intentionally or not) since the Industrial Revolution. 

The other point to address is the why - why do the elitist-pundits and attention-gatekeepers take such offense at the new creative class?  I'm looking at Keen, Carr, and Jaron Lanier - they all worry that the status of the elite gatekeepers are being threatened…and they're right.

Says Nick Carr in the Amorality of Web 2.0: 

And so all the things that Web 2.0 represents - participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism - become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state. But is it really so? Is there a counterargument to be made? Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good? To see Web 2.0 as a moral force is to turn a deaf ear to such questions.

Says Andrew Keen, in Web 2.0 is Reminiscent of Marx:

Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries — beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people — is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent. Our traditional mainstream media has done this with great success over the last century. […] Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural "flattening." No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion — Socrates's nightmare. 

Jaron Lanier says in The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Why should the word of the newspaper food critic be more relavent than a couple thousand reviews of some anonymous people online, or the word of a handful of people I actually know?  Why should a puff-piece in a computer magazine heralding the latest piece of software have more authority then the individual comments posted on a user forum?  Why should souless Top-40 music permeate my life as though it were the pinnacle of achievement?  If printed encyclopedias are so much better than Wikipedia, then why doesn't the supermarket still offer Funk and Wagnalls?

The establishment, with an economy built on access, inside relationships, and outmodded distribution methods such as print is facing an attack on all sides, frequently from new competitors, Wall Street, internal talent and staff, and shareholders.  Rather then accepting the changed reality, they lash out at the new reality, blaming it for their own shortcomings. Each new method of content creation and dissemination has had the same criticism from  their respective establishments, from the Player Piano through Swing Music to Comic Books and Videogames, with the newest scourge of the young mind being MySpace.  Although I despise MySpace, the act of tackling a new software platform (which is what MySpace is), and customizing it through widgets and layouts (even though the end product gives me a headache) strengthens the user's computer skills in ways that are transferable to the real world.  Learning has occurred, and they, as well as we, are better for it, even if only one person views the end-product.

Furthermore, there have been ample example of compliant gatekeepers who "sit on stories", bow to money, influence, and industry, or generally assume that the great unwashed are "too stupid" to handle the messy details, and only give us what they think we need to know.  Recent history abounds with examples of the detrimental effects of this thinking…

The Republic (by the chosen few) is a threat to Democracy (by the people) - and that metaphor covers society, industry, and government.

Porter closes off with a couple of paragraphs surrounding the Renaissance - a period that I thought might still be ongoing until the last couple of decades, what, with all the flat-earth society types out there.  At some point, the mantra of the Enlightenment, Question Everything, became Trust in Authority.  We've lost our creativity, and we are ill-suited to our future challenges - the only way to fix this is with acts of individual creativity.