At the limits of creative culture.

The shift from citizen to consumer has occurred alongside a rise in populist politics: the ordinary individual is celebrated at the same time as their rights and freedoms are being hollowed out or removed altogether. From the celebration of the 'battler' (who is now free to struggle outside the 'oppressive' framework of union culture), to the ubiquitous message that 'your call is important to us' (while you are being diverted to a New Dehli call centre), to the rise of DIY culture and the makeover of the house and yard (a homogenous creativity courtesy of your friendly multinational superstore), the traditional labours and struggles of the ordinary person have been reconstituted within the framework of the market so that they only retain a vestige of their prior meaning and significance.

Part of this commodification of the everyday is evident in the way our culture is in love with a particular idea of the amateur. Television, for instance, has managed an uneasy but successful hybrid of the spectacle and the ordinary by jazzing up the dreams of the amateur with programs like Australian Idol, Next Top Model, Operatunity, and So You Think You Can Dance? The idea of these shows--that a 'nobody' can magically rise to the top--has long been a myth of capitalism. Elsewhere we see a similar trend. Time magazine's 2006 person of the year was not a politician or celebrity but 'you', the 'ordinary person'. Opinion polls and surveys give the impression that your opinion matters. All of this might indicate a flowering of the democratic impulse, but very few people regard themselves as more free or empowered than before.

The flipside of this populist celebration of the ordinary is a distrust of experts: the pejorative labelling of expert knowledge as simply a product of the 'chattering classes'. Similarly, the celebrity is now favoured over the expert--Hollywood stars pronounce their opinions on the environment and world poverty, Bono becomes an influential voice at G8 summits. If some see the rise of the amateur as a win for democracy, others regard it as the collapse of any meaningful distinction between expertise and opinion, knowledge and prejudice. This mediatised sense of the ordinary, this new valuation of the amateur over the expert, represents what thinkers like Baudrillard have called a downward transcendence:

   If there was in the past an upward transcendence, there
   is today a downward one. This is, in a sense the second
   Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality,
   but this time without any possible redemption.

This 'fall into banality' is perhaps nowhere more evident than on the Internet, and is the subject of a new book titled The Cult of the Amateur. Its author, Andrew Keen, a former Internet entrepreneur, believes that we are headed towards a 'dictatorship of idiots'. The chief source of blame is apparently the second generation Internet or Web 2.0, with its capacity to allow people to publish their own opinions, steal and alter other people's creative work, and ultimately create a world of information overload where 'culture turns into a cacophony'. The growth in amateur creativity merely produces 'a digital forest of mediocrity', eroding the experts and institutions that safeguard valuable culture.

Keen focuses on three examples: Wikipedia--the open-source encyclopaedia that allows anyone to contribute and edit entries--the exponential rise of blog pages on the net, and sites such as YouTube where video footage can easily be posted and shared. These examples reveal the parasitic nature of the digital amateur: Wikipedia performs the same function as traditional encyclopaedias; blogs supplant the professional writing of the diary, novel or journalism; and YouTube replaces television or cinema. Keen argues that without the gate-keeping functions of experts, the content posted by amateurs can be unreliable, shoddy or downright misleading--even (or especially) if it is freely available.

At a general level one can hardly disagree. Many blogs are badly written or politically motivated; some are highly selective or deliberately misinform. Because anyone can post and edit on Wikipedia, errors and falsehoods can occur, and the opinion of the amateur carries potentially the same weight as the expert. YouTube's most popular sites tend towards juvenilia--the kind of thing that gets posted around the office. All of this, for Keen, erodes our 'creative civilisation'.

But like the blogging culture he attacks, Keen's work is highly selective, picking the most egregious bits from net culture so as to produce a self-fulfilling prophecy. By only focusing on Internet material that is unreliable or facile, it is easy to argue that the digital barbarians are at the gates. It is worth remembering that similar jeremiads were once levelled against 'old media'. Fears of unreliability and triviality have for instance, always surrounded the novel, from Robinson Crusoe's mix of fact and fiction to the concern that Madame Bovary would corrupt its readership. The very things Keen rails against on the net have been said about the novel from the outset. Ironically, Keen wants to preserve the very things a culture critic like Adorno found barbarous--traditional radio, television, the popular novel--and also, significantly, the market that underpins them.

All this is simply to point out that in itself Web 2.0 cannot be criticised as a cultural form any more than the book or the newspaper can. If unreliability and misinformation are Keen's major concern with blogs and Wikipedia, he might have consided the growth in literary hoaxes in recent years, from Helen Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper, to Benjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (the faked Holocaust memoir), James Frey's Thousand Little Pieces, Norma Khoury's Forbidden Love and so on. Does the fact that Harry Potter and Dan Brown outsell all other books, or the fact that Angus & Robertson bookshops are contemplating giving shelf space only to guaranteed sellers, give any indication of the authenticity of culture off-line?

The subtitle of Keen's book is 'How today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy'. Yet, like many conservative attempts to safeguard the canon, we never get a sense of what he means by culture. His range stems from Shakespeare to Paul Simon, but with no indication of his criterion of value. Nor does he consider why culture is significant. By the end it is clear that for Keen culture is the economy. He seems more concerned that people are stealing music on the net and that newspapers and television are failing because of blogs and YouTube. Keen is right to point out that workers in the creative industries may suffer job cuts as a result of digital amateurism supplanting or stealing the work of professionals. But how that might compare with outsourcing entire sectors of primary and manufacturing industries to the Third World is an issue he never addresses.

It makes no sense either, in terms of countering the perceived digital threat, to invoke the category of professionalism as a means to stabilise the flattening of culture. The professional has become increasingly specialised, to the point where they can no longer judge or interpret a wide range of issues. One only need think of the atrophy of intellectual culture, evident in the lack of publicly engaged academics. Does the specific intellectual of the twenty-first century have the same evaluative and legitimising capacities as those of an earlier kind of intellectual?

Concerns about the amateur are of course not confined to those who want to preserve a particular kind of liberal capitalism as Keen does. Many on the Left, informed by 1960s radicalism and the spirit of Situationism, now find themselves faced with a whole multitude of individuals producing culture outside of the spectacle and, in sharing files and blogging, participating in a kind of gift economy. All of this has occurred without a social revolution. As a result, they are either faced with either denouncing the amateur (banality instead of revolution), or they fuse the aesthetic radicalism of the New Left with the neo-liberal market to celebrate a revolutionary world of innovation and ceaseless change.

In fact the 'creative civilisation' that Keen wants to preserve via the liberal market, and aesthetic radicals want to celebrate via the neo-liberal market, might itself be part of the problem. Creativity undoubtedly plays an important role in any culture. However, for much of human history this role has been limited and set within relatively stable modes of work and life. Today, by contrast, creativity (or its more instrumental version, 'innovation') has become the centre of work and life, defining and driving them. The creative civilisation may at times adopt the guise of a Renaissance-like form of progress, but it is exists almost entirely within the terms of technological capital. It is this wider context, which destabilises life and empties out the meaning of any culture, that needs to be part of any attempt to evaluate what is occurring on the Internet, or indeed anywhere else amateurs might be found.

Simon Cooper is an Arena Publications editor.