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DIALOGUE
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The Internet is 90% Amateur Crap |
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| And therein lies its greatness | ||
 by Kevin Kelly, May 31, 2007
17 comments
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From this Dialogue
This is the sixth email in an eight-email debate between Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine, and Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur. Here, Kelly argues that the unapologetic amateurism of online culture is precisely what will make this medium so revolutionary a force in the history of human culture.
From: Kevin Kelly
To: Andrew Keen
Subject: Out of Crap, Brilliance
Andrew,
Like you, I enjoy my self-image as a radical (though in my case it’s all talk). But the difference between our rhetoric—other than the opposing sides we represent—is that I have no animosity toward the other side. I love books, albums, magazines, movies, silver photographic prints, and all the rest of the analog world that I am supposedly trying to make disappear. And I do not “want to get rid of copies.”
As I write this I am surrounded by my two-story library of tens of thousands of books, albums, magazines, catalogs, and photographic slides, which I have spent my life enjoying and which I plan to keep enjoying into the future. I don’t need John Updike to remind me of the value and benefits of the old-fashioned paper book; I am in no hurry to see it go. But, more importantly, there’s really nothing I can do to prevent its slow replacement by digital and hybrid versions.
In response to my “manifesto,” Updike issued a wonderfully lyrical call for book lovers to build a
Tilting at Bookshelves: John Updike fights the oceanic changes of digital technology fortress to keep out the wave of digital change. It was beautifully written, sweet, nostalgic, and of course totally inept, because it is clear that a tiny fort of book lovers cannot stop the oceanic change swamping the analog world. And I am enthusiastic about digital technology simply because I believe that in the end writers, readers, and publishers will gain more from the change than they lose.
As new business models evolve, publishers/labels/studios will make more money—and more creative works—in this new regime than before. Everyone will benefit. Readers will have more choices in content. Authors/artists will have more opportunities to create than ever before. In 50 years people will marvel at all our hand-wringing and screams of bloody murder, because the creative outpouring that has just started online will produce a degree and volume of creative work that will dwarf the greatness of the last 50 years.
Will there be crap? Of course there will be. Ninety percent of everything made is crap. And that is good. One of the reasons TV went stagnant while online bloomed is that there was not enough bad—I mean really bad—TV. Television and movies cost so much to make and distribute that the system could not generate really, really bad TV in the same way a web page, or even a book, can be really crap. Instead, the huge expense of producing TV and movies meant that the bad never had a chance. But neither did risky greatness, so all we got was mediocrity. We got middle-of-the-road TV, some shows better than others, but little of it either genius or total mind-numbing bad (and yes, I’ve seen daytime TV).
You don’t know crap until you’ve trolled the depths of the web and self-publishing. But now with the advent of YouTube, digital-video tools, and cheap DVD rentals and sales, really bad TV has been liberated! And in the midst of this morass of total crap comes the freedom and risk to make really great TV. I think it’s no coincidence that with the advent of the web, TV is now in its golden age. Shows like Lost, 24, The Sopranos, and The Wire will rank as this generation’s greatest cultural contributions. They will be taught in university courses in centuries to come.
The greatness of these long-form TV shows was unleashed by the digital technology that made re-watching important, time-shifting easy, audience infatuation contagious, and new complexity totally engaging. They are produced by professionals with big budgets, and more shows like them will continue to be made and watched by large audiences. But shorter, amateur-made films will also reach the heights of greatness, now that the tyranny of the mediocre has been broken by really easy-to-make crap.
Two admissions: One, we don’t yet know how this bountiful new world will economically reward creators, and, two, the transition is likely to be ugly. The transition from the agricultural economy to the industrial was wracked with losses of livelihood, civil unrest, and bankruptcies, as well as fortunes and great uncertainty. Buggy whip–makers, who were real craftsmen, with real families, disappeared from the economy. Should we have stopped industrialization in order to save their jobs? Should we have stopped industrialization until we could explain to them how the new economy actually worked?
I believe a better remedy would have been to accept their occupation’s demise and retrain them for 
Transitions Hurt: The shift from an agricultural economy to an industrial one wasn't painless or gracefultheir future. We can each make our own list of the sins of industrialization, but by our very participation in this industrialized world, we acknowledge that the benefits of industrialization were worth the loss of the beauty of an agricultural economy. Unless you are living like the Amish (which you can choose to do), you’ve voted for the costly advantages of industrialization. We are making a similar vote today with computer bits.
The web is all of 5,000 days old. It may take another few thousand days to figure out viable systems of law, business practices, and cultural norms that will reward audiences, creators, and the middle industries. Or it may take a generation. But that is still a relatively short time in the lifecycle of an economy.
What’s the evidence that these new models will come? My expectations are largely the product of my own experience. While I am a published author, with commercial books still in print generating royalties, the majority of my income does not come from paper books. It comes from a plurality of sources: syndication rights, speaking fees, online advertising, direct digital sales, and associative marketing revenues on the web. Am I an exception? I don’t think so. The one thing I’ve learned is that whenever I think I am an exception, it turns out that I am only a little early and the rest of the world will soon be there to make it clear my ideas are not mine. My pattern will be ordinary.
The principle that will ensure an income for the world’s artists and publishers, bands and labels, is that wherever attention flows, money will follow. If you are able to sustain the attention of an audience, and keep them interested over time, then money will flow to you. It will come both directly and indirectly (ads, sponsorship, middle folk), but it will come for two reasons. One, because we are bored and will pay for something that elevates us above life’s averageness, and, two, because we crave to connect with creators who elevate and equip us. We want to pay; just make paying easy, just, and beneficial.
The funny thing about the supposed demise of high culture (authors and books, musicians and music, directors and films) supported by classic industrial economics is that we see the demise everywhere except in the statistics. There are more books, songs, films, etc., being made every year, and more artists, authors, and musicians working than ever before. Every bit of data I have been able to find points to yet more artists and more art in the coming years. It could be that this outpouring is a heroic last gasp before culture’s ultimate disappearance by digital technology, but I doubt it. Far more likely is that this outpouring is due to the peculiar and nearly metaphysical properties of digital technology, which has turned many millions of consumers into prosumers.
You can call them amateurs, but I call them a miracle. During the 1980s and even into the early ’90s, I struggled to convince the heads of media companies that the participatory nature of the Internet was real. They were convinced that online enthusiasts like myself were exceptions. The Internet was a young male domain, they insisted, that would not appeal to females, anyone older than 19, or those living in the heartland. They were even more adamant t
It's Your World, Now: So get up off that couch and create somethinghat “no one would ever get up from the couch to make their own videos,” let alone write text. The idea of millions of videos being made by the audience was absolutely unthinkable. It was impossible. My own experiences living online, prosuming media with many others, were declared an aberrant exception. My vision of a billion people owning computers, actively creating text, videos, and music in some kind of online network was dismissed as raving utopianism.
Who can argue against the goodness of having a billion people get off the couches and start making stuff, even if 90 percent is crap? That means 10 percent is great. And not only is that 10 percent more than we had before, I will argue that eventually some of that 10 percent will be superior to the best we get from the established media industry. And even if the greatest is never made by prosumers, it is still wonderful they are off their butts and using the talents that God gave them.
—kk
NEXT: Not Everyone Can Be Kevin Kelly
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Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets a million visits per month. |
17 comments | leave a comment
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Anonymous
prosumer... Have you 'Revolutionary Wealth' by the Toffler's? If not you'd probably enjoy it; they espouse many of the same ideas you speak about.
Kdansky
One of the best articles I ever read. To the point, positive and true.
Anonymous
This article was TL;DR
Anonymous
Very very optimistic don't you think? Look at the swathes that just lounge at their TV night after night... they come home from work... and are not likely to want to be investing more work into something and not be paid for it...
While things like MySpace may seem an outlet for this sort of thing, look at the audience creating it - young students, generally or teenagers with plenty of time on their hands.
Very Utopian, and very naive. The media creation you are talking about like YouTube, MySpace and so on is like a colouring book. There is no creativity in the media.. its just an outlet for home videos.. and myspace.. outlet for opinions.. we saw this in bulletin boards, and other places many years ago. Its nothing new.. and another classic 'fad'.
Anonymous
what u just wrote was crap.
Winsome Gnarly
Forsooth and thanks to Kevin Kelly, I have realized that I am part of an oceanic change, thus I have found within myself the courage to dust off my crappy blog, and once again into the abyss!
Anonymous
Sturgeons law... 90% of anything is crap, was coined long before the net existed.
Of course, the whole point that everyone misses, and you've caught here... is that 10% isn't crap. And that 10% of a Heck of a lot, is still more than 10% of not much.
The more people produce, the more good stuff there is. It really is that simple.
Generic Anon #5
And then about one percent of all of it is porn!
Anonymous
I agree with this guy.
Anonymous
I'd say that more than 1 percent is porno, more like 70%! Hooray for porno!
A. Carlos Herrera
Funny, I just wrote something along those lines earlier this week as a new splash for my site.
The point is, we are ALL wannabes whether we like it or not. It doesn't matter if you're 12, 20 or 60 years old, struggling to pay your mortgage or wondering what company you're going to buy next, all of us look up to something unless you're a depressive maniac or your self-esteem has been run over by a tank.
We are humans, and humans have a never-ending appetite for expansion or wannabe-ism if you will.
We are all and we should all continue to be wannabes in our own way, or else we risk becoming conformist drones (like the vast majority of the population).
Really, the word amateur literally translates from French into "lover" or "enthusiast", look it up yourself in any dictionary. It also means "non-professional", but what is a professional anyway? -someone who does it as a PROFESSION, which does not necessarily mean they're good or talented just cause it's their job, at all.
The only main differences that I find between the success achieved by pros and the "amateurs/noobs" is either how disciplined, talented or how well-connected they are (this is especially true in the graphic design/art world where only 1/3 of success is due to talent alone, unfortunately) which brings us back to the splash text:
There's a mind-blowing amount of new "talent" around and, of course, most of it is crap: an ever growing army of imitators and posers producing copies of a copy of a copy of a copy with minuscule differences. Why is it ever growing? Because of the exposure the internet brings, like you mentioned in your article. There's also an ever growing amount of truly creative people without any sort of qualifications but with enough talent, drive and passion for learning, for perfecting their skills and their work, so much that they often make the pros look like "noobs". Why? because they're not doing their thing for profit or for fame, but JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT, maybe for self-fulfillment, maybe for the sake of creating and inspiring others to look beyond the real crap blurring our vision. We are our own limitation, unless we become truly creative.
We are now in the position of kings, philosophers and aristocrats from previous centuries, who had all the time in the world to think about complex ideas and create intrincated works of art... we have reached that level today, techology allows for all that and let me tell you, we are such lucky bastards, but not always.
The internet means almost infinite exposure, sometimes with undesirable consequences. Advertising agencies are well aware of that and that's exactly how new "trends" are born nowadays (I worked at two major ad agencies for about two years, so I know the "creative" process), a great example is the latest Sony Bravia tv ad, which is a blatant ripoff of Kozyndan's work.
We are facing a new type of elitism, which is no longer related to nobiliary titles or how well connected you are. It's all about talent and more important: DRIVE, you can't fake any of that for too long before someone exposes you, especially in this day and age. Just like the links above prove, not even global corporations are safe from this. If you rip someone off, it's just a matter of time before the creator finds out, so do yourself a favor and forget about "Talent imitates, genius steals" that's just not gonna cut it anymore and it might actually land you a nasty lawsuit and being labeled forever as a plagiarist. Man, so many falsely-inflated egos are going to suffer because of this...
Yes, this is the beginning of a brand new chapter in the history of everything human and related, so it's absolutely up to us to decide on which side to take... do you want to lead or do you want to be another imitator?
Do you want to be just another poser pretending to be something just to gain some imaginary status, recognition from other posers or do you really want to move people out of their state of suspended-animation through your work?
The saying that "there's nothing new under the sun" is probably as archaic as the person who coined that phrase, and he/she probably never thought of robots exploring the surface of other planets for us, nanotechnology or let alone cellphones, for example. Cellphones are definitely not smoke signals with a twist, you can't send a smoke signal from Tokyo to Antarctica unless you're a supervolcano clouding the entire atmosphere around the world.
Ideas are just ideas until someone turns them into something tangible.
WE ARE JUST THE MEDIUM, not the end result.
I am not religious at all, but the power it has is undeniable.
That power lies in the fact that when people truly believe in something (whether it's imaginary or not)they can be unstoppable... hey, it's the reason for most of the world's conflicts after all.
Let's just do everyone a favor:
DO NOT HATE -- INNOVATE, at least try a bit harder, for originality's sake.
Anonymous
This article was 90% crap.
Anonymous
Let's face it, no one would read your ranty little article if it wasn't for the internet. So thank the amateurs of the world for creating enough interest to allow the medium to suvive and spout forth your two cents of waffle.
Anonymous has spoken.
BillinDetroit
The only consistent separation between amateurs in virtually any endeavor and professionals is the paycheck. If professionals were 'all that and a bag of chips', would this world be in the mess it is? But that is using the mind that caused the problem to find the way out of it, no?
I am 55 years old and I have been arguing against a consumerist view of the internet since the BBS days myself.
While it is probably true that the overwhelming majority of people
approach the internet with a 'couch & beer' consumerist
perspective, there are also far more people who read books than there
are those who write them.
Even if my writing is, in terms of its prose, mediocre, it nonetheless is MY
writing. It expresses my thoughts in my way and that is something no
professional writer could ever do as well. That amateurishness actually
adds to to the value of what I write.
Here you are, reading my comment and learning that us old farts
write for the internet, too. Moreover, we know why we do it and we know
what makes our writing worthwhile in ways that are denied the
professional. That's a 'plus', and because of this, you will leave this
page knowing more than you arrived with. And, with effort, the more we write the better we will communicate. The policy on my blog mirrors that of the internet as a whole: "if it adds to the conversation without being blatantly spam, it can stay." I enforce this by moderating all initial comments ... and reward it by allowing spiders to follow links in those that pass that simple hurdle. ("Latter Day Spammers" who use the obvious loophole in that method will find themselves back at square one -- awaiting moderation of their first post on their new account.)
Immediately prior to wandering to this page (thank you, Stumble!), I
had been reading a very amateur page about using solar panels for
home energy supply. The author misspelled "Frisnel" lense*, but he
showed me that I could take a useful step toward energy
self-sufficiency for about $300. He has proved this by doing it.
I gained valuable additional information from him.
On this lucid and clearly professionally written site with its fluid prose and
exacting grammar, I have encountered only opinion. Opinions, as they
say, are like a certain body part ... everyone has one and needs to
keep it clean. That amateur showed me how to make my life better in a
very concrete way.
You can find one of my blogs at nmwoodworks.com/beliefs . I'm not a
Jew, but I think that I make a good defense for my beliefs. That's the
value of the amateur ... he can be earnest, well-reasoned and
convincing without ever being artfully eloquent. A million such nudges,
like crosswinds on a canoe, and the world adjusts its course.
I'm going to link to this blog from nmwoodworks.com/life . I think it has value. But I don't think it can heat my house.
*It should have been "Fresnel" -- Oh, and the paragraph tag doesn't
work in preview mode either with or without the closing tag. The
formatting on this comment is likely to be a run-on mess.
--Bill
http://nmwoodworks.com/life
http://nmwoodworks.com/beliefs
http://michigan-symphony.com
Data_wizard
We spent Christmas day with friends, watching U tube. We were celebrating that 10% of the web that is really creative. We were like kids in a candy store. It was different, it was fun and it was the future.
Anonymous
Lets just make up another statistic, maybe this article tipped it over from 89% to 90% who knows! Id like to add that 90% of media in general is cooperate produced, targeted crap for the weak minded, if you can't see the brain washing it doesn't happen right ?
Shifrah
telephones are crap
cameras are crap
nothing it's real...
ya, every...cyniscism make me sick
'Internet its a telephone with memory'