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b'I am reading Andrew Keen’s The 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. It is a very interesting, and challenging book.\\xc2\\xa0 His general thesis is that our move into the world of the “Digital Natives” (see my other blog post on that) has been essentially dumbing down our discourse. Perhaps even more to the point, he puts forward three points that catch my interest:
\\nFirst, “I”\\xc2\\xa0 matter the most. In this new world we are all equally important, and apparently all have an equal right to be heard.\\xc2\\xa0 Unfortunately, in our rush to be heard we forget that we should also listen.\\xc2\\xa0 We are rushing to be heard, and ultimately result in simply asserting our right to speak. \\xc2\\xa0 In discussing an event he attended, he writes
\\n“Everyone was simultaneously broadcasting\\xc2\\xa0 themselves, but nobody was listening. Out of this\\xc2\\xa0 anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was\\xc2\\xa0 governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on\\xc2\\xa0 the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the\\xc2\\xa0 survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under\\xc2\\xa0 these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by\\xc2\\xa0 infinite filibustering.”
\\nHe then goes on to write
\\n“The information business is\\xc2\\xa0 being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a\\xc2\\xa0 hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about\\xc2\\xa0 themselves. “
\\nSo what?\\xc2\\xa0 What’s wrong with everyone writing about themselves?\\xc2\\xa0\\xc2\\xa0\\xc2\\xa0 His point is a bit more than simply we are producing too much noise.\\xc2\\xa0 When we do take time to read, and to listen, we are no longer availing ourselves of the filters of expertise.\\xc2\\xa0 We are starting to read and value uninformed, and ignorant, analysis over the informed and educated.\\xc2\\xa0 When we no longer look to experts for opinions on lofty and heady subjects we lose the ability to truly learn, and instead replace that with a sense of knowing and not a reality of knowing.
\\nSecond, from this drift away from the works of experts to amateurs, he argues that facts and truth are no longer immutable.
\\nAgain, he writes:
\\nAs Marshall Poe observed in the September 2006 issue of the\\xc2\\xa0 Atlantic:\\xc2\\xa0 We tend to think of truth as something that resides in\\xc2\\xa0 the world. The fact that two plus two equals four is\\xc2\\xa0 written in the stars\\xe2\\u20ac\\xa6. But Wikipedia suggests a\\xc2\\xa0 different theory of truth. Just think about the way we\\xc2\\xa0 learn what words mean\\xe2\\u20ac\\xa6. The community decides that\\xc2\\xa0 two plus two equals four the same way it decides what\\xc2\\xa0 an apple is: by consensus. Yes, that means that if the\\xc2\\xa0 community changes its mind and decides that two plus\\xc2\\xa0 two equals five, then two plus two does equal five. The\\xc2\\xa0 community isn\\xe2\\u20ac\\u2122t likely to do such an absurd or useless\\xc2\\xa0 thing, but it has the ability.
\\nWhat’s even more dangerous here than just the self-absorbed cacophony is that this new cult of the amateur actually elevates opinion to the same level as educated fact. Once we believe a few hours of exposure to a topic makes us “as good as” an expert, we substitute our knowledge for real knowledge.
\\nI was listening to an ETS Talk podcast from Cole Camplese and his group at Penn State University — University Park.\\xc2\\xa0 They were attending a conference and Cole was mentioning the great work done by Michael Wesch and his students at Kansas State University.\\xc2\\xa0 In the discussion Cole talks about the change from the focus on the Professor, with 200+ hours of advanced coursework, to the “wisdom of the crowd.”\\xc2\\xa0 When they added up the experiences of the professor,'