Everyone else has had their opportunity to have a go with Andrew Keen, so I thought I would have mine. I just happened to interview him the morning before he appeared on “The Colbert Report.” I thought he handled the interview well. I mean the one with Colbert.
The one with me went well, too. I may get boos and hisses as a result, but I think he makes some valid points in his book. I don’t like the fact that it is hard to know whether what you find on the internet is true or not. I think the internet has brought to the forefront some of our worst human qualities. We are self-important and self-promoting. We are more concerned with having and expressing an opinion than knowing and understanding the facts, the truth, whatever it may be.
I don’t think there is anyway to avoid all this. The internet is here. I am not sure the ultimate effect of the internet is any different that the effect of the Industrial Revolution which brought great benefit and great oppression.
One of Keen’s major concerns is the survival of mainstream media in this “everything should be free” culture. Rather than paying $.50 for a newspaper, we get the headlines free on the internet. No need to buy the latest CD, I can get it free sooner or later on the internet. While I think these are valid concerns, the fact that we cannot go back suggests to me that we will work through this and somewhere down the road the Phoenix will rise from the ashes.
I do not grieve over the demise of print media. Good books will always be written and they will always be read. In fact, I think the MSM betrayed itself and us long ago when it made news entertainment, when it put people on the tube 24 hours a day with nothing better to do that give us inane opinions from people with limited or no qualifications, when it made profits more important than journalism, when it became politically motivated rather than a defender of the truth. If businesses go bust and journalists become umemployed, is it any different than the decimation of American manufacturing by outsourcing plants and jobs?
Whatever is wrong with the internet culture is not the result of the internet. If it reveals our worst, I have some confidence that our being continually exposed to our worst will make us better, just as TV exposed racism in Birmingham in the ’60s.
Be careful out there!
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