Is Today's Internet Killing Our Culture? Why Human Intermediaries Are Essential In A Web 2.0 World.

For anyone interested in social media, the concept of the Wisdom of Crowds, or the meaning of a flat world, we highly recommend watching this presentation by author Andrew Keen as part of the Authors@Google series.  Mr. Keen discusses his book "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture" and he makes a compelling argument for the value of intermediaries in a Web 2.0 world.

Over the past year as we've been building OrganizedWisdom to help guide people to safe, inspirational and credible health information, we've been thinking a lot about this issue and figuring out the best way to tap into the power of people sharing their own stories and recommendations. 

The biggest issue has been with figuring out the best way to organize all of the great wisdom being shared across the web, and determining the role our editors, guides and medical reviewers in helping curate all of this information. 

These are some of the questions we been dealing with (and continue to deal with) since the beginning: What rules need to be established to guide people to quality information? How do we protect people from spam?  What role should editors play?  What types of content should be considered user-generated? Is a doctor-video on YouTube user-generated? Should we include links to wisdom that are also promoting a specific product or service? And so on...

Mr. Keen makes some important statements in this presentation about the essential need for intermediaries in a world where everyone has essentially acquired their own "printing press". 

To paraphrase, he says in the Web 2.0 world, everyone is able to publish themselves. You don't have to have programming skills to be a blogger.  You don't need to have gone to recording school to produce a video.  Web 2.0 makes it very simple to create and distribute because it does away with the middleman.  And according to many who evangelize the value of Web 2.0, the middleman is bad, corrupt. Gatekeepers are bad.

But, Mr. Keen argues Web 2.0 is not a viable economy because we need middlemen.  We need the expert. Whether in marketing, creativity, or content creation, the middleman helps discover the best talent and polishes their work.  The intermediaries are the core players in any media system whether Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. If we do away with the intermediaries we are undermining media because we are undermining talent.  He warns the reality is that talent is scarce.  The core value of the ecosystem in media is finding and distributing this talent.  The ecosystem is HUMAN.  The only way of discovering and polishing the best of the best is a human function. Not an algorithm.

There is a lot we agree with in Mr. Keen's thinking.  That is not to say we are not proponents of everyone having the ability to publish, and create, and share.  We just agree that there is great value in helping organize, structure, and lend credibility to the best of what the crowds are creating.

Because this flattened media is more open to corruption and lends itself to illegitimate characters gaming the system to their advantage, we are seeing the proliferation of clutter, spam, and junk mixed in with all of the greatness, inspiration and wisdom.  How do we know what information is great/trustworthy/credible in a Web 2.0 world being infiltrated by people who are using the same virtues of open media to sell products, manipulate or satiate their ego? 

Mr. Keen makes a defense of a media with formal, official, and transparent gatekeepers because he believes "Web 2.0 is too easy to game.  To easy to play around with.  Too many sites are too easy to fix."

"The problem with this flattened world," says Mr. Keen, "is when you do away with formal gatekeepers, the problem with web 2.0 media is it is increasingly becoming one long commercial break. Increasingly hard to distinguish between paid content and free content.   The whole thing becomes one long advert.   It is becoming more difficult to distinguish between content and advertising."

We are seeing many of these issues being worked out as communities like Wikipedia institute more guidelines, editorial controls and moderation.  But there is clearly a lot more to be done in order to weed out the junk. Social media and collaboration are incredibly powerful, but as the Web expands it is becoming more clear that humans are an essential ingredient in helping monitor, organize and guide us to the very best wisdom of crowds.