Citizendium Blog

I was on the public radio program “To the Point” today with Andrew Keen, Clay Shirky, and Xeni Jardin, talking about Keen’s book and the future of Web 2.0.  Xeni has blogged it already on BoingBoing.  It was a pretty interesting exchange.  Andrew followed his now-usual shtick, saying that quality culture and professional livelihoods were threatened by the Web 2.0 “cult of the amateur,” but he was disappointingly unresponsive to a few of the harder questions.  Clay had a surprisingly fresh take toward Keen’s thesis, saying we ought to take it more seriously “than it deserves” (a nice way to put it).  Xeni had a knee-jerk reaction and basically said, “I don’t buy it, it’s just obviously wrong, isn’t it?”  Myself, I argued that Andrew lumps together two separable issues, namely, the decline in quality (”dumbing down”) caused by amateur participations, on the one hand, and the decline of the media professions allegedly (but implausibly) caused by the availability of free content, on the other.  Can’t there be high-quality free content?  After all, it is free (gratis) content, produced by journalists themselves (not amateur work) that is threatening the profitability of newspapers; we can imagine free content projects that are guided by experts.  Like the Citizendium!

I’ll be making a similar point in a review of Keen’s book coming out next week, I think, in New Scientist.