Is it too bad that I want to start a Facebook group called "I hate Andrew Keen"?

[Pamela Arraras]

I haven't even finished watching this video on Week 2 seminal viewing (sorry I'm a bit behind), and I already hate this guy! What is it with Mr. Keen? Does he resent that the "traditional western authority" is being challenged? To me it seems like what he doesn't like about the internet is that it's making the world "flat" and the people who have the "power" to feed the masses the horrible mass media we have today full of reality TV shows and forensic series (don't get mad at me i like CSI too but there's only so much death you can watch). He seems to think "the masses" as he calls them, are not smart enough to make choices, so someone else, like him, has to decide what's good for them and what's not. It smells fishy. He says the new media it's not democratic, accuses the web 2.0 of "anarchic", "chaotic", "extremist"...he says "what was wrong with the old media?"... gosh! What WASN"T wrong, besides being elitist and confined to people who have the money to go to the Smithsonian, when now my kids in Argentina can log on to the Smithsonian website and have access to the same treasures in a virtual way...
Hmmm.....I think the web2.0 revolution is making more and more people uncomfortable...we should reconsider where we base our central internet servers, just in case one day SOME people decide the masses are no longer sheepish enough...what do you think?

[Pamela Arraras]

Hi Vance! Thanks for the comment...I wrote the post even when I hadn't even finished watching the video...I was so angry! I am generally not that impulsive, but he really got to me. I think you are right; it's good to have people like him, they will help us improve and will provide a healthy counterpoint, as you say. I think I was a bit surprised that nobody else in the group had seemed to find his arguments as shocking as I did.
(BTW...sorry for disappearing on week three...work emergency...)

[Vance Stevens]

This post interests me. I think I got that interview from the TALO list, and Leigh Blackall commented that he thought Andrew Keen was 'fascist'. I had the same reaction initially, but if you Google the guy you'll see his is a serious view in wired circles. Also, BBC had him on a show at one point and that's when I realized he's a force to be reckoned with - just sharing a podium with David Weinberger is evidence of that.

So he's not easily dismissed. Some think of him as a healthy counterpoint, or perhaps a straw dog whose arguments we can consider and develop arguments against. Terry Freedman, in a presentation for K-12 online conference (the first one) gave a talk on being a change agent, and one bit of advice was to think of all the arguments you could AGAINST yours. How else to argue successfully.

Andrew King is cogent and prolific. It's worth taking his arguments on board. The better to throw them overboard :-)

Interesting to read Pamela's reaction. It's similar to my instinctive one as well,

Vance