{"id":5879,"date":"2015-02-22T09:19:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T14:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5879"},"modified":"2015-02-22T09:19:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T14:19:17","slug":"is-the-web-destroying-the-cultural-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5879","title":{"rendered":"Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?<\/b><\/i><\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n

Are we entering a cultural Dark Age, where the talented cannot earn a living creating culture?<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Longtime correspondent G.F.B. recently sent me this 13-minute\u00a0Interview with Andrew Keen<\/a>.<\/b>\u00a0This is my first exposure to Keen, and his view that\u00a0the democratization of the Web is great for politics but a disaster for what he calls the Cultural Economy<\/strong>— the relatively small but important slice of the economy that pays creators and artists to make culture: music, literature, art and serious journalism.<\/p>\n

The title of Keen’s 2007 book encapsulates his dire perspective:\u00a0The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(His 2012 book had a similar theme:\u00a0Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us<\/a>)<\/p>\n

(Author Scott Timberg makes some of the same points in his new book\u00a0Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class<\/a>\u00a0(via Cheryl A.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Keen touches on a great many ideas and themes in this brief interview, but his core point is this:\u00a0by enabling everyone to express themselves on an essentially equal footing, the Web has undermined legitimate journalism and buried the talented few in an avalanche of mediocrity<\/strong>–in his words, talent is “lost in a sea of garbage.”<\/p>\n

By eliminating the middleman who added value by sorting the wheat from the chaff–the film studio, the music labels, the publishers–the Web has created a cultural landscape where “soft, ordinary” content such as cute cat videos garner the most “likes” and clicks–the digital world’s metric for popularity and thus value in the marketplace.<\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy? Are we entering a cultural Dark Age, where the talented cannot earn a living creating culture? Longtime correspondent G.F.B. recently sent me this 13-minute\u00a0Interview with Andrew Keen.\u00a0This is my first exposure to Keen, and his view that\u00a0the democratization of the Web is great for politics but a disaster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3681,3682,1339,462,512,3680],"class_list":["post-5879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-andrew-keen","tag-cultural-economy","tag-internet","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5880,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions\/5880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}