Here is some of my own commentary:<br><div><span class="gmail_quote"><br></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism's most seductive delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology -- in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts -- will
<br>enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.</blockquote><div><br><br>I would go further than Guido and this, and indeed affirm that <everybody> and I mean indeed everybody, has something interesting to say, but it depends crucially on what topic, and on the context of exchange.
<br><br>Peer to peer processes are based on the principle of equipotentiality, see the entry here for a full treatment: <a href="http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality">http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality
</a><br><br>Jorge Ferrer expresses beautifully what it is about:<br><br>Everybody can be considered ...<br><br>"<b>equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to
themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (intellectually,
emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so
forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better
than others</b>. It is important to experience human equality from this
perspective to avoid trivializing our encounter with others as being
merely equal."
(<a href="http://www.estel.es/EmbodiedParticipationInTheMystery,%201espace.doc" class="external free" title="http://www.estel.es/EmbodiedParticipationInTheMystery,%201espace.doc" rel="nofollow">http://www.estel.es/EmbodiedParticipationInTheMystery,%201espace.doc
</a>)<br><br>Good participatory systems allow this to happen through self-selection first, then through communal validation.<br><br>A problem can arise with the second process of distributed quality control. Massification of judgment can lead to a bottoming effect, but not necessarily. It can be configured in such a way that either affinity groups or experts can play a privileged role in the validation process. The only difference is that the control is a posteriori instead of a priori. The advantage of a broader participation is that there is a greater quantity to select quality from. Finally, it is based on the idea that "together we know everything", and that even experts have limited and biased viewpoints.
<br><br>The key point is that the "danger" that Keen points to is a matter of good design principles and processes, not of the participatory process itself.<br><br>There are many p2p projects where experts, and pro-ams successfully work together.
<br> </div><br>My comments here also reply to point 2, where Keen simply repeats the arguments that have always been brought against democratization, but each time, democratization has brought more cultural creativity and diversity.
<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br><br>3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web
2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt,<br>Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of "The Castle" or "The Library
<br>of Babel". This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life, like art, shouldn't be fantasy; it shouldn't be fiction.</blockquote><div><br><br>Isn't this the same old tired argument assuming that the real and the virtual are 'separate' realms, where in fact there is just one embodied life, using various tools. This is not to say that there can be various 'abuses' and 'exagerrations' (people reading all the time, phoning all the time, surfing all the time), but they are not different from physical addictions (gambling, alcohol)
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and publishing houses has
<br>discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists of such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the "Vertigo" three). It is most unlikely that citizen media will<br>have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of equivalent prodigy.
</blockquote><div><br><br>Of course, but lets turn his argument around. Not all small media are bad media. Distributed media can aggregate so to achieve scale, and can produce qualitative works as well. I'm thinking of the music in Bali, where every musician has to follow a collective score, and can only change the score through coordination with all other participants. This is just one polarity, the other being the jazzband model of free individual creativity in communal mode. Different production modalities will produce different types of creative possibilities, which have to be judged on their own merit. Big media has clear dumbing down effects, micro media, through wrong design, can have as well.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br>6. Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically flattened market that they have christened the "Long Tail". It is a Hayekian cottage market of small
<br>media producers industriously trading with one another. But Anderson's "Long Tail" is really a long tale. The real economic future is something akin to Google -- a vertiginous<br>media world in which content and advertising become so indistinguishable that they become one and the same (more grist to that Frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).
</blockquote><div><br><br>The centralisation of sharing can , and will, have some of such effects, but this is not the only future for micro production. True distribution can avoid some of these centralisation effects. The key is to defend the continued capacity to change hubs, since hubs will always exist through voluntary choices (power law). But it is possible to design for autonomy and diversity, to offset the protocollary power of invisible architectures.
<br></div><br>Conclusion: againt Andrew Keen we must insist that participation (the peer to peer process) and elitism (the selection for quality process), can and will inevitable co-exist. The difference is that elites will be more diversified and flexible. The role of the elite is to sustain a more and greater creativity, not to put themselves as gatekeepers.
<br><br>To quote John Heron, about leadership:<br><br><p>
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<div style=""><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12pt;"><b><span style="font-weight: bold;">"</span>The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering </b>
</span><span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12pt;"><b>of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor"<br><br>Michel Bauwens<br>
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