The Cult of the Amateur: Everybody is Gutenberg in Web 2.0!

While browsing through the Virtueel Platform website, I came across the Anti Web 2.0 Manifesto (Adorno for Idiots) by Andrew Keen. The manifesto pinpoints in a very accurate way my sceptical, pessimistic thoughts on the whole Web 2.0 affair we’ve been living in for quite some years now (and perhaps also the up and coming semantic web). Like Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur (a phrase he borrowed from fellow Web 2.0 criticist Nick Carr), as he admits himself, this blogpost is biased. Very much so.

If anyone can create a puddle of mud in a swamp, it is still amateuristic. You might say to me: ‘Hey, but you’re a blogger! Blogging is web 2.0!’ Sure, guilty as charged! But therefore this post is about awareness and not about creating fear. With that being said, does Web 2.0 provide us only with amateurs or do we still have time to foster real talent? One might think that Esmee Denters, a recent YouTube phenomenon from the Netherlands, might be such an example. But there are probably quite some vocalists out there who can do the same trick (although I do admit that she has a beautiful voice). Her marketing trick however is that the fans, who followed her from the beginning, share the idea that ‘they’ve know her from when she wasn’t famous’. It is no surprise that the slogan that goes with the product is ‘You Made It Happen’. To be precise, it was famous record producer and musical entrepeneur pur sang Billy Mann who made ‘It Happen’. It’s a variation of a classical egocentric quality of humans: Who didn’t brag about that guy or girl in highschool who is now a famous politician, musician, etc.? I know him/her! (…but I wish it was me)

In the Anti Web 2.0 Manifesto, Keen places himself as the opposite of Chris Anderson by stating that: ‘Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long Tail”. It is a Hayekian cottage market of small media producers industriously trading with one another.’ Once again, one might not have to agree, one is perhaps not keen on agreeing instantly with Keen but it can’t hurt to think about it. Keen also mentions ‘a particularly unfashionable thought’ by saying that ‘big media is not bad media’ which put forth the likes of Hitchcock and Bono (I’d prefer to say U2 as a whole). They were supported and fostered by big record labels and the Hollywood studios. It is a small step to return to the example of Esmee Denters, who is fostered by major record label Interscope. Denters, a product of the Cult of the Amateur, was made into a ‘professional’ by the record industry.

Can I offer solutions here? No, because it’s an ongoing debate that will linger for a long time. Perhaps it is important to foster talent at the roots, and not let talent foster in the amateuristic puddles of mud. How long will users keep creating content for the Cult of the Amateur, will they lose their enthusiasm when they don’t get positive comments? When will they stop trying and what are the stories of users who stopped trying. The users who got tired of contributing their hard work to the Cult of the Amateur?

My thoughts are that we should foster talent. The professionals in the business are only fostering ‘talent’ at the top of the chain. A participatory culture, wherein the secrets of the industries are laid out in the open usable for the Cult of the Amateur, sounds like a utopia. But deep inside I believe, or hope, it not to be. In my personal utopia, I’d suggest we create places where people can firstly learn and secondly can contribute and are not stuck in their own puddles of mud of the great Web 2.0 swamp which encompasses a fixation on contribution. Let’s discuss new ideas, like Keen suggests in the video below. Below you can see a presentation from Andrew Keen at (what Keen proclaims to be) the ‘belly of the beast’, being Google HQ in Mountain View.

Advertisement

Talking about ‘Fans, Bloggers and Gamers’

For the Masters of Media blog at the University of Amsterdam fellow student Roman did a Podcast on Henry Jenkins‘ new book Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture and he called me up to talk about it. Got to love those vintage phonelines and the aesthetics of Podcasts!

You can check it out in this blogpost, or you can download the ‘Discussing Jenkins’ Podcast directly from here. And since we’re talking about bloggers here, check out what other blogs say about it here, here and here. The first link includes an interesting interview with Jenkins.

Disrupt Technorati

This next thing is an interesting initiative. Make a blogpost and link as many people to disrupt -or maybe you could call it hack- Technorati’s ranking system. It’s like the Google bomb for blogs, and why shouldn’t we participate in such an initiative to check out what it does, right? It would be interesting to see what happens if this thing grows big. Web statistics would become less reliable.

Although I’m not sure if this idea is original, I got this through Laurence-Hélène’s blog and the initiator Mark Collier’s Viral Garden blog. eMarketeer Seth Godin also made a post about this, and his list looks different already from the list that I have posted below. To read how this works here is a part of the how-to from Mark Collier’s post Revenge of the ‘Z-Lister’:

What YOU can do is simply create a new post on your blog, but CUT AND PASTE the list I have below, and then ADD any blogs you feel aren’t getting their due either. It can be 1 blog, or a hundred(or none if you simply want to repost the same list), but the idea is, find those great blogs that, for whatever reason, you feel aren’t getting their due, link-wise.
Then after you leave your post, the next blogger will do the same thing, cut and paste YOUR list, and add THEIR blogs to the list, then repost it. Add the same instructions in your post that the next blogger should cut and paste YOUR list, and add any blogs they feel should be on it to THEIR list. The list will get increasingly long, and all the blogs will get a sort of reverse ‘pyramid-affect’ of link-love.

This is the infamous list:
Creative Think / Soloride / Movie Marketing Madness / Blog Till You Drop! / Get Shouty! / One Reader at a Time / The New PR / Own Your Brand! / OTOInsights / bizandbuzz / Work, in Plain English / Buzz Canuck / New Millenium PR / Pardon My French / Troy Worman’s Blog / The Instigator Blog / AENDirect / Diva Marketing / Marketing Hipster / The Marketing Minute / Funny Business / The Frager Factor / Mindblob / Open The Dialogue / Word Sell / Note to CMO: / That’s Great Marketing! / Shotgun Marketing Blog / BrandSizzle / bizsolutionsplus / Customers Rock! / Being Peter Kim / Billions With Zero Knowledge / Working at Home on the Internet / MapleLeaf 2.0 / darrenbarefoot.com / Two Hat Marketing / The Emerging Brand / The Branding Blog / CrapHammer / Drew’s Marketing Minute / Golden Practices / Viaspire / Tell Ten Friends / Flooring the Consumer / Kinetic Ideas / Unconventional Thinking / Buzzoodle / NewsPaperGrl / The Copywriting Maven / Hee-Haw Marketing / Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn / Multi-Cult Classics / Logic + Emotion / Branding & Marketing / Popcorn n Roses / On Influence & Automation / Bullshitobserver / Servant of Chaos / converstations / eSoup / Presentation Zen / Dmitry Linkov / aialone / John Wagner / Nick Rice / CKs Blog / Design Sojourn / Frozen Puck / The Sartorialist / Small Surfaces / Africa Unchained / Perspective / gDiapers / Marketing Nirvana / Bob Sutton / ¡Hola! Oi! Hi! / Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid! / Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together / Community Guy / Social Media on the fly / Jeremy Latham’s Blog / SMogger Social Media Blog / Masey.com / New Media Wanderings / Return on Innovation / T’s Melange / Masters of Media