ajfortin.com

In Andrew Keen’s new book “The Cult of the Amateur” he complains that the internet is transforming our culture into a cacophony of “infinite filibustering”, a noise of “hundred million bloggers all talking about themselves; a place where truth is “flattened”, where “ignorance meets egoism, meets bad taste, meets mob rule … — on steroids.” And more to the point, this “chaos of useless information” is not just pop culture entertainment, but a threat to civil public discourse, “encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft and stifling creativity.”

Andrew, you have my attention.

Keen’s polemic is powerful, disconcerting and painfully truthful in many respects. Yet it doesn’t quite square with my experience. Now I could argue that in the health care blog space, civil discourse is more the norm than the exception. That’s my take. Yet that notion could be easily challenged by another’s experience with the extremism of the extremely ideological blog.

No, I want to take another tack. So here’s my problem with accepting Keen’s POV in one word: China.

In reading his book, the complaints he voices sounded very familiar. It hit me that I’ve read them before as the very reasons why the internet is controlled in China. The degradation of culture, the undermining of social stability and traditions, the unreliability of the information, the destruction of public morals — are all touted as the rationale for the restrictions on internet cafes, blocking of web sites, and prosecution of bloggers who get too close to sensitive political issues.

So what that says to me is that Keen may be too culturally and politically myopic. And that while one may agree with him when it comes to the U.S. or the West in general, the deep breath of fresh air that the internet, blogs and the rest of that cacophonist explosion brings to the public sphere in China is undeniable. “Amateur journalism”, far from trivializing and corrupting serious debate, as Keen says, has saved the official Chinese media from total and utter irrelevance. Instead of fragmenting audiences into thinner and thinner slices, the internet has galvanized the Chinese public opinion enough to compel state action on a number of fronts — AIDS being one of them. The internet has become a delicate thread of Chinese democratic practice — messy, argumentative, emotional, troublesome, illusive — upon which China’s future is being woven.

It’s not a perfect public forum. And the risks that Keen sees are still there. But it is an expression of a public voice that has for too long been silent.