According to Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur, Web 2.0 is “killing our culture, assaulting our economy and destroying time-honoured codes of conduct” with amateurs creating an “endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.” It is, “undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent.” Wikipedia is identified as a particular villain, being riddled with “mistakes, half truths and misunderstandings” but yet being more popular than Britannica.com, thereby threatening the latter’s financial viability. What Wikipedia has done to reference books, bloggers will do to traditional news media, believes Mr Keen.
I believe Mr Keen is being alarmist, because ultimately, quality matters. The laws of natural selection apply in the virtual, as well as the real world. The very best survives and the rest fade away. Britannica.com will live on because it is acknowledged as being authoritative whilst Wikipedia is not. The mainstream media cannot be seriously challenged by citizen bloggery and will remain ascendant because of its inherent professionalism and quality in depth. Web logs are a passing fad and the current intense activity will pass leaving only a small number of the most committed.
Part of Mr Keen’s hypothesis relies also upon a premise that the average punter cannot differentiate between different sources of information with the result that the good will fall and the bad will prevail. Yet we know that anything free is unlikely to be as good as something paid for. Free, net-based sources of information are just a convenient, useful point of first reference before turning to, for example, the trusted newspaper, news magazine, or reference book.
Much on the net is trashy and ephemeral but the important point is that we all know it and when we don’t want monkeys, we avoid paying peanuts.
John-Paul Flintoff - The Sunday Times