Kevin Marks on Andrew Keen

I find little to like in Andrew Keen’s elitist writings, but Kevin Marks (bless him) can find something worthwhile there, despite all:

[from Keening for Culture]

This kind of Oxbridge cleverness for its own sake is part of the Guardian/BBC Platonist culture that sees its role to lead the uneducated masses to better themselves, while sneering at their plebian interests. Keen continually calls Google “Orwellian”, while ignoring the emotional core of 1984, which is the tension between Winston’s day job at the (BBC-derived) Ministry of Information, controlling the party line, and his private diary, written “to the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different for one another and do not live alone”. […]

So what did I like? I liked that he said the web was a mirror of ourselves, but I see him as a Caliban cursing his reflection, as I said five years ago:

• The web we see is a reflection of ourselves individually as well as collectively.
• With 2 billion pages and counting, we can never see it all, and when we venture outside the well trodden paths of the personal web we know, we are more likely to make mistakes in our maps, and come back with ‘here be dragons’ written across entire continents and tales of men with no heads.
• I think this effect, rather than malice or wilful misrepresentation is what is behind such things as journalists’ clueless articles on weblogs or congressman fulminating against the net consisting mostly of porn and piracy.

There is more, delivered in the wonderful Marks style. I find Kevin rewarding, perhaps in part because he is more than willing to employ Shakespearean references to make a point.

Meanwhile, I have found myself softening to trolls like Keen, Dvorak, and Carr. Perhaps because I believe that they increasingly don’t matter, and that the majority of people have no time for them: even the extremely literate and wired. Or perhaps, like Kevin, I have come to believe that the occasional insight or well-turned metaphor makes the rest , if not worthwhile, at least legitimized.