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Last night I attended an interesting talk at the Frontline Club where Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, argued that blogs, social networking and user generated digital content pose a threat to our culture, economy and civilisation. Very quickly it became clear that Keen relishes his role as contrarian and provocateur and that his tongue was very often in his cheek. Even so, he did express with passion his concerns about Web 2.0 as a toxic mash-up of, as he put it, ‘the countercultural Sixties, the free market idealism of the Eighties, and the technological determinism and consumer-centricity of the Nineties’.

Under discussion was the question of ‘is blogging killing journalism?’. Keen’s argument against bloggers required first the construction of a straw man. In comparing the millions of rarely-visited personal blogs with the New York Times Keen makes a simple category error and is just plain incorrect to say people are finding looking for factual news by reading blogs. Keen is not himself a trained journalist (maybe this is why he is in such awe of them) and as the evening wore on it was increasingly obvious to me that blogosphere is very much his spiritual home: a place for strong opinions, polemic and debate. But hardly ever for breaking news. A member of the audience pointed out the circularity of Keen’s argument that any blog which makes sufficient revenue through advertising to pay its author(s) is no longer a blog but an online magazine. By this logic, anything that’s bad is a blog (Web 2.0), and anything that’s good is an online magazine (traditional journalism).

Keen is very much of a type of Englishman who transplants himself to the United States to get rich (California if at all possible) and at the first blush of homesickness constructs in his imagination a false memory of an England replete with all the modesty, decency and natural authority that he finds so absent in his new home. If Hogwarts opened a branch in Pasadena, Keen would be first to enroll his kids. Keen heaped lavish praise onto the BBC as emblematic of quality traditional media. This seemed a strange thing to be doing just as the tax-funded public broadcaster is mired in problems ranging from faking phone-in contests to real sloppiness in news coverage. Even Beeb stalwarts like Jeremy Paxman acknowledge there’s a problem. And it is just not convincing to say, as Keen does, that it is the web that has put the conventional media into such dire straits. The mainstream media has tried to mimic the lively and interactive cut-and-thrust of the web. Just as not every blogger has the makings of a great journalist, not every journalist has the makings of a great blogger. When old media fails online it has no one to blame but itself. Here is some sage advice for old media considering how to operate online.

So, to return to Keen’s main argument, should we be paying any attention to the thousands of amateurs who are now able to share their thoughts with anyone who’ll look? Keen says we should not but complains that Web 2.0 makes it almost impossible to screen them out. As I see it, thanks to the internet, enthusiastic amateurs are sharing an enormous amount of the very same things that journalists provide us, in some cases going far beyond what paid professionals can produce, both in quality and depth.

Artist Bruce Nauman had a point when he said that if you’re an amateur ‘you can get it sometimes and not other times and you can’t tell and you can’t always do it over again’. There is a merit in training, practice and peer review, all of which can be found online if you know where to look. But the value of trial and error and the power of determined enthusiast should not be underestimated. Much of human progress has been down to this unplanned, piecemeal approach. Look at how Julian Todd at unDemocracy has singlehandedly brought the United Nations online.

In the bygone England that Keen so admires, there was a clear distinction between ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’. Gentlemen were not paid to play, players were professionals. Gentlemen were seen as possessing the grace and style, standing apart from the talented, but mercenary and therefore slightly tawdry, players. The players of the professional media have too long had it their own way and their captive audience has allowed them to become lazy and complacent. Commercial pressures and industry belt-tightening are make things worse but the rot set in long before.

The murderous street gang kids in Liverpool who make YouTube videos of themselves toting handguns and joy riding stolen cars are telling us that they make their own fun, they don’t want what’s on offer from one-to-many broadcasters. It’s chilling but even in this most macabre corner of user-generated content there is something empowering about the desire to break down the barrier between producer and consumer, performer and audience. Web 2.0 has not turned the tables, as Keen suggests, but rather has allowed all of us to choose on which side to sit, and given us the freedom to move from one side to the other, and back again, as we choose. The age of deference to natural authority derived from privilege and power is evaporating. Authority is not something you get from going to the right The players have had their time in the sun. Gentlemen and gentlewomen of Web 2.0, citizen activists, musicians and writers, you now have the chance to shine.