ZOMGASSHAT

I really hope Andrew Keen chokes on his own ignorance. I remember seeing him on the Colbert Report and I couldn't tell if he was serious because I honestly couldn't believe than anyone not being paid by Big Media, let alone an independent minded author would actually think this way.

Keen's argument is flawed from the word go. He compares user-generated content to the T.H. Huxley's idea of unlimited monkeys at unlimited typewriters, but that's not quite applicable. Huxley's monkeys are all equally incompetent on their own, while our human internet is filled with god damned geniuses. The primates are capable (theoretically) of producing a quality work on with all of them working together at once. The interwebz show that people are quite capable of doing it on their own with sometimes alarming frequency.

So immediately Keen has shown himself as an ignorant, elitist snob, sneering down at the lowly likes of us who dare post something of ours that we think is cool online. It's not that he's wrong about how much crap there is out there, but he seems incapable of comprehending that, just like with any other form of media, you can ignore it. Just because a blog is out there doesn't mean you have to read it. And just because Fox News is out there doesn't mean I have to watch it. I don't think it's even necessary to mention that I've seen plenty of blogs with a quality of reporting that Fox News could never even hope to emulate.

His argument against Wikipedia assumes that no one posting edits to an article knows anything about the topic or that people are actually trying to put misinformation up there. I've yet to actually get incorrect information my use of Wikipedia (that I know of), and perusing pages on topics that I happen to know quite a bit about doesn't yield the inaccuracy that he would have us think is so prevalent throughout the site. Most of the people that post edits actually are knowledgeable about what they're posting about, and the ones that aren't get corrected by the ones that are. In fact, the most common occurrence of what Keen is trying to blow the whistle on is actually the example he provides: large corporations, the kind that he wants everyone to trust for their media, editing articles about them in their own favor. Hmm.

His attack on Google's "collective intelligence" makes me wonder if he's ever actually used Google. He seems to be under the impression that people go to Google to ask it deep, meaningful questions and seek insight, not find a store's webpage to look at it's hours of operation. Those types of people use AOL. If I type in "Parkway Music Clifton Park" in Google, I should goddamn hope that the website of Parkway Music in Clifton Park is first hit, I imagine that if it weren't, enough people would be clicking it to correct that.

I honestly wanted to break something when he accused internet news of not focusing on important events. Does he really think that nothing was going on in any of those war zones while every major news venue was devoting all of it's coverage to the imprisonment and/or "liberation" of Paris Hilton? Come on! Yes, Reddit and Digg will frequently focus on interesting, but ultimately trivial things on their main pages, but you can also narrow the scope of stories to things like politics or even the war in Iraq. Regardless, though, if you're the kind of person who uses Reddit or Digg as their only news source, you probably aren't very concerned with what's going on in the Gaza Strip anyway.

I'm not touching his ideas on social networking with a 10 foot pole.

Finally, oh noes! The interwebz are killing the economy! Run for the hills! Really? Are we seriously to believe that Web 2.0 managed to only take away jobs, with creating any in the process? How many people does it take to keep YouTube running? Reddit? MySpace? Get with the program, you Luddite, tahms ah changin'! Frankly, I imagine all those people who lost their jobs at time just went and got similar jobs at internet publications. Unless you've actually got numbers to back up that the total number of jobs has gone down because of this stuff, I'm not buying it. This wouldn't be the first time that people had to learn a new trade to keep up with technology. It's called "progress".

God, this guy makes me so mad I want to punch babies.