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Have you all read this?

Full Text: Keen vs. Weinberger
July 18, 2007

This is the full text of a "Reply All" debate on Web 2.0 between authors Andrew Keen and David Weinberger.
[Andrew Keen]

Mr. Keen begins: So what, exactly, is Web 2.0? It is the radical democratization of media which is enabling anyone to publish anything on the Internet. Mainstream media's traditional audience has become Web 2.0's empowered author. Web 2.0 transforms all of us -- from 90-year-old grandmothers to eight-year-old third graders -- into digital writers, music artists, movie makers and journalists. Web 2.0 is YouTube, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook. Web 2.0 is YOU! (Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2006).

Is Web 2.0 a dream or a nightmare? Is it a remix of Disney's "Cinderella" or of Kafka's "Metamorphosis"? Have we -- as empowered conversationalists in the global citizen media community -- woken up with the golden slipper of our ugly sister (aka: mainstream media) on our dainty little foot? Or have we -- as authors-formerly-know-as-the-audience -- woken up as giant cockroaches doomed to eternally stare at our hideous selves in the mirror of Web 2.0?

Silicon Valley, of course, interprets Web 2.0 as Disney rather than Kafka. After all, as the sales and marketing architects of this great democratization argue, what could be wrong with a radically flattened media? Isn't it dreamy that we can all now publish ourselves, that we each possess digital versions of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, that we are now able to easily create, distribute and sell our content on the Internet? This is personal liberation with an early 21st Century twist -- a mash-up of the countercultural Sixties, the free market idealism of the Eighties, and the technological determinism and consumer-centricity of the Nineties. The people have finally spoken. The media has become their message and the people are self-broadcasting this message of emancipation on their 70 million blogs, their hundreds of millions of YouTube videos, their MySpace pages and their Wikipedia entries.

Yes, the people have finally spoken. And spoken. And spoken.

Now they won't shut up. The problem is that YOU! have forgotten how to listen, how to read, how to watch. Thus, the meteoric rise of Web 2.0's free citizen media is mirrored by the equally steep decline in paid mainstream media and the mass redundancies amongst journalists, editors, recording engineers, cameramen and talent agents. Newspapers and the music business are in structural crisis, Hollywood and the publishing business aren't far behind. We've lost truth and interest in the objectivity of mainstream media because of our self-infatuation with the subjectivity of our own messages. It's what, in "Cult of the Amateur," I call digital narcissism. A flattened media is a personalized, chaotic media without that the essential epistemological anchor of truth. The impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert is replaced by murkiness of the anonymous amateur. When everyone claims to be an author, there can be no art, no reliable information, no audience.

Everything becomes miscellaneous. And miscellany is a euphemism for anarchy.

That's the dark side of the Web 2.0 story, more Kafka than Disney. While we are all busy embracing our inner user-generated-content, the world -- real life rather than Second Life -- is passing us by. This is infantilized self-stimulation rather than serious media for adults. Web 2.0's democratization of information and entertainment is creating a generation of media illiterates. That's the nightmare. And it's easy to see. Just go online and look at YouTube, the blogosphere, Wikipedia, MySpace or Facebook.
[David Weinberger]

Mr. Weinberger responds: You're right. The Web is a problem. It has been from the beginning and it always will be.

But your dichotomy is false. The Web isn't Cinderella facing Gregor "The Cockroach" Samsa in a deathmatch. Despite Time -- which, as a pillar of the mainstream press is of course free of the hyperbole so common on the Web -- the Web isn't even You. It's us. And that is the problem.

Your wildly unflattering picture of life on the Web could also be painted of life before the Web. People chatter endlessly. They believe the most appalling things. They express prejudices that would peel the paint off a park bench. They waste their time watching endless hours of TV, wear jerseys as if they were members of the local sports team, are fooled by politicians who don't even lie convincingly, can't find Mexico on a map, and don't believe humans once ran with the dinosaurs. So, Andrew, you join a long list of those who predict the decline of civilization and pin the blame on the latest popular medium, except this time it's not comic books, TV, or shock jock radio. It's the Web.

This time, of course, you might be right...especially since you and I seem to agree that the Web isn't yet another medium. Something important and different is going on.

We also agree that the Web is a problem. The problem endemic to the Web even before anyone gave the Web version numbers -- and the problem that leads to your issue with "cockroaches" -- is that because anyone can contribute and because there are no centralized gatekeepers, there's too much stuff and too many voices, most of which any one person has no interest in. But, the Web is also the continuing struggle to deal with that problem. From the most basic tools of the early Internet, starting with UseNet discussion threads, through Wikipedia, and sites that enable users to tag online resources, the Web invents ways to pull together ideas and information, finding the connections and relationships that keep the "miscellaneous" from staying that way.

But, why should we trust the way "monkeys" (as you refer to Web users in your book) connect the pieces? We shouldn't trust them blindly. Open up The Britannica at random and you're far more likely to find reliable knowledge than if you were to open up the Web at random. That's why we don't open up the Web at random. Instead, we rely upon a wide range of trust mechanisms, appropriate to their domain, to guide us. Amazon gives you ways of checking to see if a particular reviewer is trustworthy , but the mechanisms are not particularly rigorous because not all that much is at stake when considering the 6,001st review of a Harry Potter book. At eBay, where your money is at risk, the trust mechanisms are more reliable. On a blog, the persistence of previous posts means you can read further to see if you trust the blogger. More important, the recommendation of other bloggers you already trust is a good indicator. At Wikipedia, the rather sophisticated governance processes help establish trust, as does the complete transparency of the discussions behind the articles. On mailing lists, we learn over time who's a blowhard and who's a source of knowledge even if we don't know what her real name is. These examples are not exceptions. They are the rule and they have been from the beginning, because from the beginning the Web has been about inventing ways to make its own massness -- its miscellaneousness -- useful.

Compare that to the previous generation of media. The traditional media are not Cinderella to the Web's cockroach, and not just because the traditional media have their own cockroaches. The Web is far better understood as providing more of everything: More slander, more honor. More porn, more love. More ideas, more distractions. More lies, more truth. More experts, more professionals. The Web is abundance, while the old media are premised -- in their model of knowledge as well as in their economics -- on scarcity.

Amateurs aren't driving out the pros, Andrew. The old media are available on line. If some falter, other credentialed experts will emerge. But the criteria governing our choice of whom to listen to are expanding from "Those are the only channels I get" and "I read it in a book" to "I've heard this person respond intelligently when challenged," "People I respect recommend her," and even "A mob finds this person amusing." This is the new media literary, suited to the new abundance.

Will we choose wisely? Compared to what? We are never going to be a species of Solons, moved only by higher thoughts and the finer emotions. But the history of the Web so far says that we are highly motivated to come up with ways to make sense of a world richer and more interesting than the constrained resources of the traditional media let on.

So, Andrew, a question for you. You bemoan the loss of "the essential epistemological anchor of truth" and the "impartiality of the authoritative, accountable expert." It's easy to agree with that when it comes to facts, the sort of stuff we consult almanacs for. But when it comes to the more important and harder issues, where we want to understand our world -- science, politics, the arts -- are you quite as comfortable with the notion that there are identifiable epistemological anchors? Or is your epistemology in fact rooted in the scarcity that has silently shaped the traditional media?
[Andrew Keen]

Mr. Keen: I agree that the Web is us. It's a mirror rather than a medium. When we go online, we are watching ourselves. So the question is do we want to be looking at ourselves as our best (Cinderella) or our worst (the giant cockroach)? My point is that what appears to the Web 2.0 crowd to be a Disney production is actually a Kafka remix.

You are right that people have always chattered endlessly about the silliest things. But the self-publishing Internet is the greatest of great seduction. Web 2.0 tells us that we all have something interesting to say and that we should broadcast it to the world. As I argue in my book, Web 2.0 transforms us into monkeys. :-) That's the new abundancy, the long tail, if you like. Infinite primates with infinite messages on infinite channels. The only good news is that broadband is still pathetically slow. But what happens when fiber-to-the-home becomes a reality for all of us? What happens with the monkeys have the technology of the Gods at their paw tips? Media will be transformed into ubiquitous chatter -- into an audio-video version of Twitter.

Yes, the web does represent an abundancy of everything -- "more porn, more love, more ideas, more distractions." This is fascinating to a philosopher of knowledge like yourself, but for mere mortals who rely on their media to "understand the world", new digital abundance will lead to intellectual poverty. The more we know, the less we will know. You see, to use this chaotic media efficaciously, we need to invent our own taxonomies -- which isn't realistic for the majority of ordinary people (seeking to understand the world) who think a "taxonomy" is something that drives us to the airport.

Meanwhile, traditional scarcity is getting scarcer. We've always had a scarcity of seriousness, of talent, of the artist/intellectual able to monetize their expertise. As you know better than most, it's hard work thinking up, writing, selling and then marketing a good book (both "Cluetrain" and "Everything is Miscellaneous" are really good, albeit wrong). Traditional media has done a good job in discovering, polishing and distributing that talent. But once everything is flattened, when books are digitalized, when libraries become adjuncts of Google, when writers are transformed into sales and marketing reps of their own brands, then what?

Which brings me to back to your question about epistemological anchors. I value people like yourself who are able to package up interesting arguments in a physical product which has monetary exchange value. You do a great job helping your reader understanding their world and they do a great job buying your book, thereby allowing you to pay your mortgage and write more books thereby helping more people understand their world. My concern is that this scarcity, the scarcity of the intellectual authority able to help people understand the world, is indeed endangered -- particularly if the physical book goes the way of the physical CD and the physical newspaper. So let me end with a question to your question. Are you convinced that Web 2.0 is of benefit to traditional intellectuals like yourself? Are you confident that, in a flattened media in which authors give away their books for free and collect their revenue on the back-end, the David Weinberger 2.0 of the future will flourish (or even survive)?
[David Weinberger]

Mr. Weinberger: When you claim the Web is a "Kafka remix," you can't mean that everything on the Web is bad, if only because, well, you have your own blog, which is good but wrong. :) So, you must mean that the preponderance of what's on the Web is bad, as bad as cockroaches. And, as I said, I suspect you're right. That'd be a problem if we had no way of locating what's of value. But we do. Lots of ways. More ways every day, as I described earlier.

Rather than re-treading that ground, let's talk about the nature of talent, and why you see monkeys and cockroaches everywhere you look on the Web.

You and I agree that genuine talent is scarce and needs nurturing. But your picture of talent is formed by the binary view the traditional media have forced on us. Because it's been so expensive to produce, market and distribute cultural products (books, records, films), the lucky few who get published get access to a mass audience, and the rest trail off the map. So, traditional distribution makes it look like talent is a you-got- it-or-you-don't proposition -- you're an artist or you're a monkey. That doesn't reflect the scarcity of talent so much as the scarcity of distribution, a result of the high cost of delivering the first copy of a mass-produced item.

In fact, we have every reason to believe that talent is distributed in a far smoother (but still steep) curve. My friend Joe is an amazing guitarist, but he's not the best guitarist around. Neither is my sister-in-law Maria the best singer in the world, but she's good and you would spend an enjoyable, and sometimes moving, night listening to her in the local chorus. Talent is not either/or. Recording contracts are.

With the Web, we can still listen to the world's greatest, but we can find others who touch us even though their technique isn't perfect.

Note the "we can find." We couldn't if finding required creating our own taxonomies, as you say. Instead, we rely on (1) Taxonomies created by experts (newspapers that categorize their stories, stores that categorize their offerings); (2) Computer-assisted ways of locating what's relevant (search engines); and (3) Recommendations made by people we trust. We're getting better at all of these. It's where some of the (4) most surprising innovation is occurring.

I certainly do agree with your concerns about how we're going to pay talent. I don't have any answers or predictions, but I suspect every institution whose value rides on the scarcity of information or the difficulty of distributing it will face this issue eventually. And those are some institutions we both care a lot about. There are whole classes of professionals who may find themselves without work. That's a frightening prospect. (On the other hand, delivering this value on the Web is a business opportunity, so it would be premature to declare defeat.)

We will lose some talent. We'll gain some that otherwise would have been left behind by the binary selection process in the real world. Of those, a few will be world-class. Many will make the world only somewhat better. And some will be screeching, violin-playing monkeys whose efforts we will flee from.

But that raises one other myth that I think runs under your comments. You say "the intellectual authority able to help people understand the world is indeed endangered." Then you ask if I'm convinced that the Web benefits intellectuals. Yes, I am. And that's because, while some talent is indeed solitary, many types of talent prosper in connection with others. That is especially true for the development of ideas. Knowledge is generally not a game for one. It is and always has been a collaborative process. And it is a process, not as settled, sure, and knowable by authorities as it would be comforting to believe. So forget my homey examples of Joe and Maria. Consider how much more we know about the world because we have bloggers everywhere. They may not be journalists, but they are sources, and sometimes they are witnesses in the best sense. We know and understand more because of these voices than we did when we had to rely on a single professional reporting live at 7.

I was an academic a long time ago, Andrew, but I haven't forgotten how isolated I felt in the philosophical community before the Web. Ideas were scarce back then because space, time and the limitations of paper made it hard to hear what others were saying and well nigh impossible to talk with them about it. Today I am in contact with people who come up with ideas I'd never have encountered, who are sources of wide expertise, who squirrel away in public on tiny topics, who spew a long tail of speculations with occasional insights that are worth the wait, who take me apart because my logic is wrong or my biases are showing or my grammar has gone screwy, who support my good ideas and just let the bad ones pass. Without any doubt, I am in the richest, most stimulating, most fruitful swirl of thought, knowledge, ideas and feeling ever in my life...far more productive than when I was consigned to talking only with professionals and credentialed experts. This is fundamental to my experience of the Web, just as monkeys and cockroaches are to yours.

Andrew, maybe you just ought to find some better blogs to read. :)

Now a question: For academics, scientists and serious intellectuals, do you think the Web is nothing but a disaster? In fact, since businesses learned long ago that knowledge is social, do you seriously maintain that the work of business -- I'm not here thinking of ecommerce -- can only be degraded by being done on the Web?

(As for "David Weinberger 2.0," I appreciate your confidence, but I'm still in beta.)
[Andrew Keen]

Mr. Keen: I can be as cocky a cockroach as anyone, thus my blog has gigantic insect footprints all over it. :-)

I agree wholeheartedly with your comments about the online academic community. Any medium which brings experts and professional authorities together is healthy. I am thrilled that you've discovered such a rich intellectual community online. If this is Web 2.0, then I love Web 2.0. I'm a Cluetrainer when it comes to serious people conversing fruitfully on the Internet. The problem, however, with Web 2.0 is that most of the conversation seems to be taking place anonymously, conducted -- in a manner of speaking -- by people who are more interested in vulgar insult than respectful intellectual intercourse. The comments sections of most major website are littered with this trash. As is the blogosphere. So, yes, the Internet is great for experts to discover one another and conduct responsible conversation. It's the monkey chorus on the democratized web that bother me.

The issue of talent is the heart of the matter. How do we traditionally constitute/nurture/sell talent and how is Web 2.0 altering this? My biggest concern with Web 2.0 is the critique of mainstream media that, implicitly or otherwise, drives its agenda. It's the idea that mainstream media is a racket run by gatekeepers protecting the interests of a small, privileged group of people. Thus, by flattening media, by doing away with the gatekeepers, Web 2.0 is righting cultural injustice and offering people like your friends Joe and Maria an opportunity to monetize their talent. But the problem is that gatekeepers -- the agents, editors, recording engineers -- these are the very engineers of talent. Web 2.0's distintermediated media unstitches the ecosystem that has historically nurtured talent. Web 2.0 misunderstands and romanticizes talent. It's not about the individual -- it's about the media ecosystem. Writers are only as good as their agents and editors. Movie directors are only as good as their studios and producers.

These professional intermediaries are the arbiters of good taste and critical judgment. It we flatten media and allow it be determined exclusively by the market, then your friends Joe and Marie have even less chance of being rewarded for their talent. Not only will they be expected to produce high quality music, but -- in the Web 2.0 long tail economy -- they'll be responsible for the distribution of their content. No, if Joe and Maria want to be professional musicians paid for their work, they need a label to make an either/or call about their talent. That's the binary logic that informs any market decision -- from music to any other consumer product. Either they can produce music which has commercial value or they can't. If they can't, they should keep their day jobs. If they can produce commercially viable music, Joe and Maria need the management of professionals trained in the development of musical talent.

I respect your attempt to escape from the either/or realities of market economics. But I'm afraid this is the binary logic of life. The culture business is ugly. It rewards talent and punishes those who don't have it. The democratization of talent is a contradiction in terms. Even part-time cockroaches like me know that.
[David Weinberger]

Mr. Weinberger: Yes, let's talk about talent.

The people who make my life on the Web so positive intellectually include a brilliant but crazy college drop-out, a practicing medical doctor who is interested in information theory on the side, a struggling working mom who has a keen eye for bulls---, a theologian at a tiny seminary I'd never heard of, and a guy I know nothing about but who on a mailing list for five years has explained in detail the implications of FCC rulings. Most of these people would not, could not, or did not make it through the traditional credentialing and publishing systems in the areas they're writing about. They are not "experts and professional authorities," but I'd be a fool to ignore this "talent" just because many of them are "amateurs." Likewise, our culture overall would be foolish to stick within the safe boundaries of the old credentialing system...

Especially since the old talent system, the fate of which you bemoan actually doesn't work the way you say it does, and does not yield the results you claim for it. The mainstream media's business model does not aim at nurturing talent. It aims at moving units. It therefore does exactly what you complain the Web does: It panders to the market. If you want to see the "democratization" of talent you fear, just look at a Top 40 chart. There are bright spots, but you seem to have confused the mainstream media's handling of artists with apprenticing in Michelangelo's studio.

In fact, your assessment that "agents, editors, recording engineers" are "the very engineers of talent," betrays just how deeply you've drunk the mainstream Kool-Aid. Talent isn't engineered. Hits are. Even in the best of circumstances, (and judging from the acknowledgments in both our books, you and I have been in these best of circumstances), agents, editors and engineers come at the end of the nurturing process. A musician -- especially of the "refined" sort you prefer -- owes more to her teachers, parents and performing partners than to her agent and engineer. That's where the nurturing of talent occurred. Academics are an especially bad example for you, Andrew, since making it through the scholarly publishing gate brings them so little money and generally very little attention from editors.

The question, therefore, is not whether the traditional media's taste is better or worse than the Web's. The Web doesn't have taste, good or bad. The Web is not an institution, a business, or even a market, any more than the real world is. It's us. We have lots of different tastes. On the Web we can better fulfill those tastes (because of the Long Tail you ridicule in your book), rather than simply relying on others to decide for us what is worth attending to.

But, that's not the whole story. When I say the Web is us, I don't mean that it's an aggregation of individuals -- a herd of screeching monkeys or a scurry of voiceless cockroaches running from the light. We're connected, primarily through talk in which we show one another what we find interesting in the world. That's essential to the Web. The Web is only a web because we're building links that say "Here's something worth your time, and here's why." It's a little act of selflessness in which a person who has our attention directs it elsewhere. (That's why your polemical use of the term "monkey" is not only intentionally obnoxious but essentially false and misleading.)

There is therefore hope here that in the midst of the ever-present low culture, we will together educate our tastes, seeing more of the world than the traditional media could ever show us, and learn to appreciate it. Included in this hope is, of course, the fact that the traditional gatekeepers are themselves online, telling us what is worth attending to and why. Now their influence depends on how convincing and articulate they are, not on their control over the on-off switch on the broadcast tower or printing press. That is, the gate keeping goes from dictating what we can read to telling us what we ought to read.

Now let me address the other sort of nurturing to which you refer: the sort that money brings. Money is important. Allow me to switch to PowerPoint mode, for brevity:
• You overstate the rosiness of the current situation for artists, scholars and other creators. Very few make a living through the traditional media.

• Lots of creative people are making money on the Web, including traditional, edited, gate-kept media.

• It's way too early to declare that artists will not be financially supported on the Web. We are at the beginning of a painful transition. We're not yet done inventing.

• It may well be that the Web results in fewer mega-stars. But it may also become an important addition to the real "business model" of most artists and creators, providing more listeners who will not only download their creations but perhaps come to their performances. The Web is actually additive for most creators.

We will also have more terrible "artworks." So what? We should ignore them just as we skip over most channels on TV. Except we're far more sophisticated in how we travel the Web than we are when using the sequential clicking of a TV remote. On the Web we'll continue to invent ways to find what matters to us.

Of course we will, because "mattering" is the real driver of the Web.
[Andrew Keen]

Mr. Keen: So I did what you suggested. I took a look at the New York Times best-seller list. The top six non-fiction hardback books for the week of June 10 were:

1. "The Assault on Reason" by Al Gore
2. "The Reagan Diaries" by Ronald Reagan
3. "Einstein" by Walter Isaacson
4. "God is not Great" by Christopher Hitchens
5. "Presidential Courage" by Michael Bechloss
6. "A Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah

None of these books seem to be "engineered" hits. Gore as #1 and Reagan as #2 collectively disprove the right/left wing critique of big media as a right/left wing racket. A strong marketing and sales effort on behalf of a 700-page, $32 biography of Albert Einstein seems to me like a noble achievement on the part of big media to bring science to the people. Equally noble is their commitment to Beah's book, a searing narrative about the contemporary African tragedy and the power of personal redemption. As a wannabe Hitchens myself, I'm a big fan of an anti-populist polemic which goes against the beliefs of the majority of God-fearing Americans. Gore/Reagan/Isaacson/Hitchens/Bechloss/Beah are all talented authors who have written original and important books that require the marketing and sales muscle of mainstream media to be broadly distributed. And even if these hits are "engineered" by big media -- so what? Indeed, I applaud the engineering of books about critically important subjects in politics, history and theology. I want my kids reading the awful truth about life in Africa. I want them to get mugged by Hitchens on the question of God's (non)existence. I want them to attempt to digest a 675 page biography about Einstein.

You say that mainstream media's only goal is "moving units" which "pander to the market." But surely those supposedly nefarious fellows who run our publishing houses could come up with easier way of moving units than 675-page biographies of a German physicist or a 308-page civics lecture by Al Gore? No. The truth is that the editors in charge of America's publishing industry value high quality books. And the reading public obviously values these texts too. The wisdom of the literate crowd is reflected in the New York Times list. Book readers are smarter than you think. We the audience don't want to read crap. Then I went to Technorati to look at the six most popular blogs for the same week. This, to borrow your language, is what "matters" in the world of Web 2.0:

1. Engadget
2. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
3. TechCrunch
4. Gizmodo
5. The Huffington Post
6. Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide

David, you say we have "lots of different tastes," but it seems like the hits on blogosphere are much less intellectually diverse than the hits on the New York Times book list. Engadget and Gizmodo are blogs about new technology gear -- iPods, BlackBerries, iPhones etc. TechCrunch and Lifehacker are geeky technological blogs for technology geeks. The Huffington Post is, I admit, a valuable read -- although it seems to me to becoming more like a traditionally authoritative newspaper than an unedited blog. Meanwhile, Boing Boing is a surreal and supremely inane compendium of miscellaneous knowledge -- listing stories about kidney donor hoaxes, a pedagogical tract on "How to Kiss" and, a game-theory piece entitled "an economic analysis of leaving the toilet seat down."

I respect your faith in the miscellany of knowledge, but I worry that it's you, in fact, who have sipped the Kool-Aid. I want my kids reading Reagan and Gore rather than how-to articles about kissing. I fear that the overall consequence of the democratized blogosphere is akin to leaving the toilet seat down. But this isn't a game and it isn't theory. Sites like Boing Boing are flushing away valuable culture. Rather than a directory of wonderful things, Web 2.0 is a miasma of trivia and irrelevance. It doesn't matter.
[David Weinberger]

Mr. Weinberger concludes: Actually, I'd suggested you take a look at the Top 40 songs. Of course you're within your rights to cite the New York Times best-sellers list instead, but that's indicative of the problem with your method. Are you seriously maintaining that pop culture off line is represented by six good books on the New York Times hardcover non-fiction list? Why do you find it so awkward to acknowledge the obvious point that the gatekeepers of commercial publishing and production -- the producers of TV shows, magazines, pop music, movies, books -- are usually driven not by high cultural standards, but by the need to reach a broad audience? Do I need to remind you that "The Secret" is likely ultimately to outsell all six of those worthy books combined?

We could argue over the value of the six top blogs versus their analogues in the traditional media. I could point out that those blogs are not the work of amateurs, but are profitable businesses run by experts. I could even rise to your BoingBoing bait, as if that site needed my defense against your selective reading. But, all that would miss the real point: The Web is not mass culture, so we can't just look at the most popular sites to see what's going on. Most of the action is in the long tail of users, sites with just a handful of links going to them. So, pointing to the "short head" of highly popular sites not only tells us little, it views the Web through a distorting lens, as if sites were read-only publications rather than part of a web of conversations.

Andrew, the mud you throw obscures the issues you raise. Porn sites, silly posts, monkeys, cockroaches, toilet seats. This rhetoric isn't helpful. In fact, in your attempt to be controversial, you're playing into the hands of political and economic forces that would like the Internet to be nothing more than an extension of the mass media. If your book succeeds on the best-seller lists, but contributes to the Web becoming as safe, narrow, controlled and professional as the mainstream media, I believe you would be almost as unhappy as I would. It's a shame because we need to be taking seriously the issues you raise. But to talk about them, we need to get past the notion that the Web is all dreck all the time and that it is nothing but a great "seducer" of taste.

For example, you're right that we're in the middle of a disruption of the professional media "ecosystem," as you aptly call it. Some of our professional media are faltering before we have built their online replacements. It's frightening, especially if you're delighted with the existing mass media. But, the transition is hardly over. If these institutions have value, then providing that value on line is an opportunity that may well be addressed by the market (have faith, Andrew!) or by the new economics of cooperative social production expounded in Yochai Benkler's seminal "The Wealth of Networks" (which is available, of course, in its entirety for free online). Further, these newly fashioned mechanisms for delivering old-fashioned value will have their own advantages, as well as the weaknesses you note. Wikipedia, if nothing else, is more complete and current than printed encyclopedias -- and we can quote it at length without getting sued. iTunes enables some worthy musicians to find their own small audiences. Open access scientific journals have made far more research (including peer reviewed papers) available to scientists than ever before -- a good example of what I think of as the power of making information miscellaneous. In fact, amateurs and professionals are getting "miscellanized" so that their influence is proportional not to their status but to the value they contribute...and our understanding of the professionals is being enhanced by their revealing more of their amateur, personal side in their blogs.

Most of all, a serious discussion of amateurism has to be able to admit that it may have some benefits. For example:

(1) Some amateurs are uncredentialed experts from whom we can learn.
(2) Amateurs often bring points of view to the table that the orthodoxy has missed, sometimes even challenging the authority of institutions whose belief systems have been corrupted by power.
(3) Professional and expert ideas are often refined by being brought into conversation with amateurs.
(4) There can be value in amateur work despite its lack of professionalism: A local blogger's description of a news story happening around her may lack grammar but provide facts and feelings that add to -- or reveal -- the truth.
(5) The rise of amateurism creates a new ecology in which personal relationships can add value to the experience: That a sister-in-law is singing in the local chorus may make the performance thoroughly enjoyable, and that I've gotten to know a blogger through her blog makes her posts more meaningful to me.
(6) Collections of amateurs can do things that professionals cannot. Jay Rosen, for example, has amateur citizens out gathering distributed data beyond the scope of any professional news organization.
(7) Amateur work helps us get over the alienation built into the mainstream media. The mainstream is theirs. The Web is ours.
(8) That amateur work is refreshingly human -- flawed and fallible -- can inspire us, and not just seduce us into braying like chimps.

Yes, Andrew, we are amateurs on the Web, although there's plenty of room for professionals as well. But we are not replicating the mainstream media. We're building something new. We're doing it together. Its fundamental elements are not bricks of content but the mortar of links, and links are connections of meaning and involvement. We're creating an infrastructure of meaning, miscellaneous but dripping with potential for finding and understanding what matters to us. We're building this for one another. We're doing it by and large for free, for the love of it, and for the joy of creating with others. That makes us amateurs. And that's also what makes the Web our culture's hope.

Write to the Online Journal's editors at: replyall@wsj.com.

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