Andrew Keen and the Gatekeepers
I just finished watching a talk / Q&A on Ustream which took place at the Mahalo offices. For those of you that have never heard of Andrew Keen he was an early web entrepreneur but is more widely known for his recent book The Cult of the Amateur
During Andrew’s talk I found much that I would agree with but there were also some inherent flaws. A very generalized two point overview of his discussion would be:
- An unfiltered Internet leads to chaos and a break down of factual information.
- Gatekeepers are needed to determine the validity of information and then disseminate that information.
Wikipedia was one of the examples used for the need of this type of system. As useful as people find it, the information can often be flawed. He also brought up a point early in his conversation and it is, I believe, a valid one. That is the premise that over the next few years 2 billion newcomers will join the Internet. The majority of these will be citizens from Third World Countries. He surmised that these people, not having been subjected to mass media, will inherently "believe everything they read". That in turn leads to a break down in the value of the Internet itself.
What I find interesting about his hypothesis is how if we expand on his thinking, were really talking about is accountability, and in relation, social responsibility.
How can this be bad? Let’s start with the initial premise. I don’t believe that anyone who really thought about it, could disagree with the need for accountability in information dissemination. No one loves Spam except those spreading it. When you want information on a topic it would be nice if you could trust that the first source was an honest source. Right now you can’t really do that. There are no checks and balances. (Mahalo believes they are filling that void thus his appearance.)
This is where the "Gatekeepers" come in. These would be knowledgeable people who could be trusted to provide factual and relevant information. Sounds good but who are these people? During the Q&A he stated that those with knowledge beyond that of average people, as it relates to the subject matter, would be the "Elitists", ie. the Gatekeepers. In this system debate is taken out of the equation. Ideas are no longer challenged. The masses become sheep led about the countryside by a select few. Sounds a lot like State ran Socialism.
My personal viewpoint is that his theory is a sound one. The problem is implementation. In the chat room during his talk someone stated "the Internet is a mirror of civilization". The problem is that it’s really just a mirror of western civilization. The world is not a part of our community as a whole. When they finally are it will become even more difficult to wade through the mire. "Separating the Wheat from the Chaff" as it were will become almost impossible.
The real problem in all of this is the fact that were human. We’re flawed creatures with egos too big for any of this to ever be feasible.
Then again that’s just my two cents worth and no one ever said that I didn’t have an ego.
