Forever Amateur...

Capt. Bart Mancuso: [Ramius comments in Russian to Borodin that Mancuso is a "buckaroo". Ryan laughs] What's so funny?
Jack Ryan: Ah, the Captain seems to think you're some kind of... cowboy.
Captain Ramius: [in Russian] You speak Russian.
Jack Ryan: [in Russian] A little. It is wise to study the ways of ones adversary. Don't you think?
Captain Ramius: [in English] It is.
Hunt for Red October, 1990

I've started reading The Cult of the Amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture by Andrew Keen.

I know, I don't think it sounds like something I would read, either.

Let's be honest...
I am the amateur.
I am the hack.
I am the guy, according to Keen, that's killing the Internet.

To the loved ones of the Internet, I truly am sorry. I send you my condolences.

In the past five years, the Internet has 2.0ed. It's social. It's open. You can say what you want to say, do what you want to do, be who you want to be. And people will listen. Millions will watch some stupid YouTube video, hundreds of thousands will see your photographs, tens of thousands will read your article thinking you are an expert.

The Internet normalizes the playing field. Experts or newbie. Pro or Amateur. Everyone is level. And, according to Keen, this is driving the Experts nuts. Gotta love it.

Looking at my own small piece of the Internet... Do you know what my most popular article ever written is? The article that I wrote on Paula and Randy White divorcing. Life changing stuff I know. (I'm embarrassed that this is the article that I am known for.) Since I wrote the article, Google has me as it's #1 webpage when someone searches for "Paula Randy White". Check the graphic on the left. I'm #1... their (old) own church's website, "Without Walls" is #5. Dude, I beat their own website by an article I wrote... that's pretty sad...

Thus the normalization factor. All of a sudden I'm the expert on the Whites. (To the Whites, I'm not a stalker, really. I'm just a guy that knows how to play a game.)

Keen's view of the Internet sounds a lot like the Music Industry ten years ago, or the Motion Picture Association in the past five... We can save the world, change our culture if we do this or if we change that...

I have a news flash for people who think this...
you cannot change culture...
you cannot make people think like you want them to...

BUT you can play their game.
You can learn their systems, what makes them think.
You can learn their laws, respect their authority.
You can learn their language, communicate on their level.
You can learn their culture, modify from within (instead of fighting windmills)

To think that you can impact, change the culture without obeying it's rules is just silly. Instead of lamenting loss, figure out how to play the game. Leverage culture against itself...

Thoughts?

Comments

[Daniel]

Comments like that crack me up. It's the age old, "once I'm in, no one else should get in" problem.

You're right on the record industry. Instead of welcoming the change that digital brought as both inevitable and a fresh start, the clung tightly to the only things they knew, denied that things were changing, and then began suing the very people they were supposed to be working for. They wrote their own death certificate, when the very easily could have been at the top of the new world (or at least a huge part of it) instead of the clinging existence of an old era.

the digital world makes it both easy to get in and easy to become ubiquitous at the same time. The educated guys who understand (and even built) the digital world we now live in should be using their expertise to be the forerunners in it. Not lamenting onslaught of the "great unwashed".