Amateurs, amateurs, amateurs, dit is de korte samenvatting van de gelezen hoofdstukken. We zijn in ieder geval gepromoveerd van ‘Aap’ naar ‘echte amateur.’ Ik voel mij lichtelijk vereerd, dat de ‘geniale’ Andrew Keen mij geen aap meer noemt.

Jammer genoeg kom ik erachter dat ik zonder een goed diploma beter niets op internet kan publiceren. Je moet namelijk hoge diploma’s hebben om goede stukken tekst te publiceren op het internet. Ook ben je altijd objectief als je vele diploma’s bezit. Amateurs worden dus afgeschreven als schrijvers die subjectieve apen die geen normaal stuk tekst kunnen publiceren.

De ‘Oxford English Libary’ en de ‘Britannica enclopedie’ zijn betrouwbare bronnen waar professionals hun feiten vandaan halen. Alles is hier met de hand geschreven, maar wanneer een ‘amateur’ dit in eigen woorden op internet plaatst (begrijpbaar voor apen), dan is het ineens een onbetrouwbaar slecht geschreven stuk tekst. Raar zou je zeggen, maar toch klopt dit als een bus, volgens Keen.

Het klopt ergens wel dat het werk van professionelen betrouwbaarder is dan dat van amateurs, maar zoals er ook onderscheid is bij professionelen, is dat er ook bij amateurs. Een werkstuk van een meisje van 10 over het weer is beduidend slechter dan een Profielwerkstuk over het weer. Toch zijn beide amateurs. Ik, als amateur, controleer ook mijn bronnen. Dit is nodig als je een goed stuk tekst wilt schrijven, maar toch word ik nog vergleken met een meisje van 10 of een aap. Het rare hiervan is, dat een meisje van 10 al weet hoe ze dingen kan posten op WordPress en dat Keen dit zelf ook doet op typepad.com. Is dat ook niet amateuristisch? Dan zou een stuk tekst wat ik uitspreek en opgeschreven wordt door een professional, ook een uitstekende tekst zijn?

Het klopt dat er op sites als Youtube ook genoeg onzin filmpjes staan, maar wie stoort zich daar aan? Wie gaat er nou lopen zoeken naar filmpjes die hij/zij niet leuk vindt? Niemand, dus ook ik of Andrew Keen niet. Waarom ergert hij zich er aan, als hij er niet mee wordt lastig gevallen? Ik mag hopen dat hij weet hoe een zoekfunctie werkt en dat hij dus niet alle filmpjes gaat doorzoeken tot hij er één van een professional vindt. O wacht, dat kan natuurlijk niet, want iedereen verschuilt zich achter een pseudoniem en zo is het bijna onmogelijk om erachter te komen wie de amateur en wie de professional is. Of is het zo dat professionals geen pseudoniem gebruiken en amateurs wel?

Kortom, weet Keen zelf wel wat hij allemaal schrijft?
Keen herhaalt en herhaalt maar zijn simpele argumenten, maar als je er goed over nadenkt, klopt het van geen kanten.  Als alleen professionals hadden meegedragen aan het internet, dan werd er nu door amateurs geen gebruik van gemaakt en sturen zij bijv. ‘twitteraars’ elkaar postduiven met ‘tweets.’ Lijkt onmogelijk, maar een oneindig aantal achter een een typmachine, kunnen ook een meesterwerk schrijven…



Andrew Keen begint met vertellen, waar hij al zijn wijze woorden vandaan heeft. Dit komt niet van Huxley af, wat zijn drankmaatje dacht, maar van Thomas H. Huxley.Volgens Huxley is het zo dat als je een oneindig aantal apen achter een oneindig aantal typemachines zet, er vanzelf een meesterwerk geschreven wordt. Keen maakt hiermee de vergelijking tot het internet. De apen staan voor de ‘amateurs’ achter de computers. Andrew Keen noemt ons graag ‘amateurs,’  want volgens hem zijn wij dat allemaal. De media die Grotendeels op Youtube, Myspace, Facebook, Bebo enz. gepost zijn, zijn onzin, gepost door ‘amateurs.’

Teksten in oude media, zoals kranten, zijn gepubliceerd door professionelen die altijd de waarheid schrijven. Keen heeft de afgelopen jaren niet zo goed opgelet, want elke krant heeft andere artikelen over dezelfde onderwerpen. Mensen zijn verschillend en denken verschillend na over dingen, hierdoor zal een nieuwsbericht nooit, maar dan ook nooit geheel objectief zijn. Hierbij komt het verkrijgen van valse informatie ook nog eens bij, mensen worden vaak verkeerd ingelicht.

Keen zag vroeger zelf iets in het internet, maar heeft zich er nu helemaal tegen gericht. Hij is naar eigen zeggen, ‘te’ kritisch geworden. “Media mag alleen geproduceerd worden door experts,” mensen die geld horen te verdienen met het produceren van media. Mensen die ‘slimmer’ zijn dan de rest. Amateurs horen geen media te plaatsen op het internet, want zij weten niet wat de definitie van ‘waarheid’ is. En dat terwijl deze definitie gewoon op internet te vinden is, geplaatst door ‘amateurs’ en dat geld voor het grootste deel op internet. Door het gebruik van Web 2.0 is internet wat het nu is.

Door de komst van Web 2.0 kan iedereen schrijven wat hij wil, dus ook dingen die niet waar zijn. Een goed voorbeeld hiervan is Wikipedia, waar iedereen informatie aan toe kan voegen. Hier is het al eens fout gegaan, maar de ‘amateurs’ die feiten nodig hebben, weten waar ze hun informatie vandaan moeten halen.
Ditzelfde geld voor de talenten die nog ontdekt moeten worden. Talenten worden altijd ontdekt. Kijk naar sporten. Bijna alle jongens hebben of zitten op voetbal en toch worden uit al die jongens, de paar talenten gevonden. Een kenner herkent ten alle tijden een talent.

Keen is bang dat de mensen die geleerd hebben niet meer onder doen voor de mensen niet geleerd hebben en dus talentvol zijn. Volgens Keen mag en kan dit niet. Je moet geleerd hebben om er vervolgens geld voor te vragen.
Maar willen mensen alleen maar media zien, lezen en horen van experts? Zeker niet, anders zouden amateurs geen kans maken op het internet en dat is in deze tijd zeker niet het geval. Keen praat zelf over dansende pluche apen op Youtube, hij zal het dus zelf ook gekeken hebben. Waarom? Omdat het filmpje veel bekeken werd. Waarom werd hij dan nieuwsgierig? Wist hij niet zeker of het filmpje geplaatst was door een expert of amateur?

Keen draaft teveel door in zijn eigen droom. Amateurs zullen altijd op deze wereld blijven bestaan en daar kan hij niet om heen. Internet is nu alles en dus zullen ook de amateurs daar gebruik van maken.
Keen zijn beschrijving is ook te vinden op Wikipedia, maar waarom? Dat is toch voor amateurs?
Keen zal vast en zeker, als ik, als ‘amateur.’ zijn leeftijd verander op internet, het willen terugdraaien. Maar ja, wie is dan de amateur en wie de expert? Mensen zullen dit verschil niet zien en het zal ze niets uitmaken. Expert of niet.

I just found this video and thought it was quite interesting. I shan’t comment for fear of being flamed but it is nice to hear an intelligent voice speaking of fears about the effect of user-generated content.

View with an open mind and a pinch of salt.

By John Sener

Disclaimer: I am both uniquely qualified and perhaps ill-suited to write a review of this conference. Uniquely qualified as Director of Special Initiatives for Sloan-C and as one of a handful of people who have attended all 15 Sloan-C conferences; ill-suited because of the possibility of “bias” but also because, frankly, I spent most of my time there as usual talking with colleagues rather than attending conference events. So this will be a more impressionistic review of the conference rather than a comprehensive one. In reality, the conference has gotten so big that it’s not possible for a single individual to provide a complete review.

Up front, one new development is worth noting in particular: tweeting. I started tweeting at conferences earlier this year, but this was the first time for me to do so at a Sloan-C conference, and I did so throughout. The evolution of the tweetosphere even over the past few months is remarkable. People were coming up to me afterwards and thanking/complimenting me for my tweets; I found myself scanning session rooms to find fellow tweeters posting on the same presentation; I was able to get tweeted summaries of other presentations without attending them or being burdened to find print handouts; and I even met someone new because I mistook them for a fellow tweeter — so it’s becoming a notable social undercurrent at many conferences. Oh, and tweets make great notes for preparing articles like this one . . .

The person primarily responsible for bringing the Sloan-C conference into existence, Dr. Frank Mayadas, was the keynote speaker. Frank offered a three-part view of the current state of online education: retrospective, current, and future. The retrospective piece was of course gratifying for us “old-timers” who always appreciate the opportunity to reflect on just how far we and the field have come. How in the early days (in my case, pre-World Wide Web) we cobbled together makeshift or relatively primitive products (e.g., Lotus Notes, First Class, Web Course in a Box, Allaire Forums) to create online courses, while remembering the first Sloan-C conference where everyone knew everyone else (95 participants) and there were two presentations for each concurrent session.

Fast forward to the current conference with almost 1400 attendees total, including ~170 virtual attendees, and 40-50 presentations per concurrent session. Online higher education has entered the mainstream and continues to grow at a brisk clip thanks to the development of a lively practitioner community capable of rapid response, along with the growth of a healthy vendor community which has provided tools to fuel online education’s growth. But what about its future? Dr. Mayadas called for online education to reach truly full scale (as also reported in this Chronicle of Higher Education article), which would likely involve additional changes to the current landscape, such as more targeted government support and greater attention to making online education attractive to a much larger proportion of faculty.

Unlike many conferences which are struggling with conference attendance due to budget crises and constraints, this conference actually grew in size relative to last year, with a 5% growth for onsite attendance and 20% overall growth for the conference including virtual attendees. On Thursday morning, I “convened” the plenary session for the virtual attendees, which meant I monitored the computer feed (messages and questions), responded to any transmission issues as well as I could, and relayed any questions or comments to the speaker during the Q&A period. Although it was difficult to know from the messages, it appeared that many if not all of the virtual attendees were finding value in this presentation at least; and as one virtual attendee noted, virtual attendance was good not only for his budget but also for his waistline, as he was eating a lot less food than if he were attending the conference in person.

The speaker, Andrew Keen, has attained some fame due to his book The Cult of the Amateur, and his self-professed aim as a “polemicist” was to provoke thought and discussion through expounding his contrarian positions, for instance:

• The Internet poses a danger precisely because it makes education too inexpensive (cheap/free).
• Educators’ authority is based on the authority conferred by their hard-won wisdom and must be maintained; kids don’t really know anything of value (i.e., wisdom).
• The Internet’s real-time speed prevents thoughtfulness, which is another challenge to educators.

Needless to say, Keen’s talk provoked a fairly lively Q&A session (and evoked strongly contrasting reactions from attendees afterwards). It would have been nice if he had understood his audience a little better; at one point, his speech was proceeding under the assumption that most of his audience were tenured faculty, so he seemed a bit surprised when he actually polled his audience to find that very few (<10%) were in fact tenured faculty. All in all, however, Keen succeeded in his goal to provoke thought and discussion about the issue, even if IMO he missed a golden opportunity to have a more nuanced discussion of the issues with an audience that was more sophisticated about the issues than what I suspect he customarily faces. Then again, perhaps his aim was more on target: over the past several years the Sloan-C conference has evolved into a conference which attracts a large proportion of first-timers, and this year was no exception, with perhaps as many as 50% of the attendees being first-timers (based on a show of hands at a plenary session).

I also attended several concurrent sessions which reinforced for me that online education continues to evolve, expand, even backtrack in a myriad of directions. One of them had a “back-to-the-future” feel for me, as the presenter was advocating a return to modularized learning management systems as an alternative to the current crop of LMSs and their relative inflexibility and drive toward being enterprise-level solutions. The discussion at another session on learning objects reminded me that we were well past the days of attendees looking for wisdom from pioneer presenters; instead, the audience is often at least as knowledgeable as the presenter(s). That session generated a side conversation with an attendee about a particular learning object repository solution her institution was using, so I did that in lieu of attending additional sessions that afternoon.

______________________________

During the panel, I had an epiphany of sorts, realizing the extent to which online education has provided an opening for private sector companies to become more deeply involved in higher education.

______________________________

The next morning, I served on a panel discussing the issue of relationships between higher education and the corporate sector, specifically vendors serving the online higher education market. During the panel, I had an epiphany of sorts, realizing the extent to which online education has provided an opening for private sector companies to become more deeply involved in higher education. Some may react to this insight with a “duh!”, and to some extent I also wondered why it took me so long to realize this. I’d been more focused on the other unanticipated effects of online education on higher education, such as the creation of higher, more concrete standards and expectations for course quality and instructor involvement.

Later that morning, I attended a session which described research showing how the Quality Matters project has positively impacted its users several years later. After the session, I got involved in yet another extended  “shop talk” discussion. No doubt I missed lots of good conference sessions, and indeed that’s now unavoidable. But for me the great value of this conference has been, and continues to be, the quality of interaction with long-time colleagues and meeting new ones. In other words, for me the conference is a non-stop schmoozefest.

Some would say this is a highly ironic observation to make about an online education conference. I would say that an in-person conference is an excellent form of tribal gathering to touch base with those numerous colleagues with whom the primary relationship is an online one. Virtual conferences are on the rise, they already have some advantages, and they will only get better. In-person conferences may be attended less frequently, but they are not going away anytime soon — at least if they maintain the quality provided by events such as the Sloan-C conference.

I confess to erring when I wrote a couple of months ago that the L.A. Times editors should consider running white space in lieu of James Rainey’s media column. Instead, he’s become the gift that keeps on – well, you can guess the rest.

In yet another of his “You readers are all stupid, now read to what I have to say” masterpieces, he rips what he acknowledges are a minority of fruitcakes who criticized writer Amy Wallace’s article in Wired magazine that rebuts the alleged links between rising cases of autism and childhood vaccines.  This is in spite of the fact that Wallace, when interviewed on NPR, openly welcomed the responses she’s received, even though a few have been misguided and even profane.

Rainey doesn’t bother to disclose that. Instead, he laments that the world is brimming with idiots, ever emboldened by their Internet connections. “We see a wave of amateurs convinced they can write a pithier movie review, arrange a catchier song, even assess our planet’s shifting weather conditions, better than the professionals trained to do the job,” he writes.

I’ll concede on global warming, but songwriting and movie reviews?  I must have missed the Beatles’ and Elvis’ formative years at Juilliard. I’m unaware of Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert graduating from the Bosley Crowther School of Celluloid Critique at Columbia University, but I don’t always keep track of such esoterica. However, I’m pretty certain Rainey attended for his doctoral studies.

As an amusing aside, the online version of Rainey’s article is bracketed by Google ads hawking the same disinformation he is trying to debunk. But I digress.

Rainey makes it sound as if sanctimonious, know-it-all blowhards suddenly began appearing with the advent of the Internet. They’ve always been out there. But 50 years ago, they needed to type a letter, correct the mistakes, address, stamp and mail it. Nine times out of 10, the target threw it in the garbage without so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. Now, people can slam their targets without leaving their chairs. So, why not?

I will agree with Rainey there is a surfeit of nutwings out there, and their unfounded prejudices are fueled by ill-informed and undereducated celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy. But that is not the entire story.

The fear of vaccines stem not only from ignorance but ever-present suspicions about the drug industry. These are the same people who ply doctors with free lunches, speaking gigs and other honorariums to get them to recommend their products, which are then sold to patients at grossly inflated prices. Wallace does admit that the physician she focuses on in the article, pediatrician Paul Offit, made at least several million dollars from sales of a vaccine he invented that is sold at a 17-fold markup. Offit says it was an unforeseen consequence of his research, but he didn’t exactly turn it down.

And while Wallace’s article is a fine piece of journalism and Offit may be passionate about defending the scientific method, most people never receive such passion for their well-being from doctors. They get cursory visits and a hastily scribbled prescription – and often sticker shock at filling it.

Wallace also failed to mention that the debate on autism occurs in a push-me-pull-you flurry of scientific data. One study is published claiming a link to cancer, and another is published the following year rebuts it. Half a century ago, the common treatment for heart attack victims was bed rest – something the medical community now concludes puts patients at risk for developing fatal blood clots. There may indeed be a dozen current studies debunking a link between vaccines and autism. They may hold up over time. Or they may not.

Lump all that in with the extraordinary difficulty of caring for an autistic child – another burden often met by the medical profession with indifference – and that is among the reasons there is so much anger out there.

Wallace is onto something when she notes that pseudo-science offers comfort, which is why it has attractions. Being told you’re wrong only geometrically amplifies the anger.

Of course, you can leave that part to Rainey. He quotes Andrew Keen, an author who has claimed the Internet has left us culturally bereft, even as he helped propagate it by being a part of various Web startups.

“Keen makes abundant sense when he argues that people who have worked hard to gain expertise can’t so easily, and passively, cave in to ‘the wisdom of the crowd,’” Rainey writes. “He believes experts — in the media, science, law – need to drop their ‘false, almost suicidal, humility.’”

Right. Because a bunch of elite members of society arrogantly getting into the faces of people who are already uneasy or suspicious of them will persuade them to change their minds.

I can only predict one thing with certitude: fewer people will be reading the L.A. Times a year from now than they are today. Perhaps Rainey can discuss that cause-and-effect  in a future column.

Uma visão simplificada do fenómeno Web 2.0 mas que desperta os adormecidos.

Sobre o universo descrito por Andrew Keen: “Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what war governing the infinite monkey now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering”.

This has been going on for a while and it is effecting more than just photography. Music copyists and typographers were the first to go (anyone remember them?) Journalist and photographers are trying to think of ways to reinvent themselves as their professions are transformed. It was described in a rather famous article and book from a few years ago, The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen.

There are not as many clients as there used to be for high-end professional photography and the expectations have changed a great deal. I work at an ad agency—exactly the kind of large big-city ad agency that kept dozens of local photographers well-fed a decade or two ago. We still use a lot of photography, but more and more of it is destined for 72 ppi reproduction on the web (2 inches tall) rather than 300 dpi magazine spreads, transit posters or billboards (30 feet across). A great deal of this photography is done by a new kind of professional. Not the old-time professional photographer with the big studio and staff but the new breed of art director-photographer who shoots in a converted conference room down the hall, ten minutes later is editing the photo on their Mac and can show you the finished layout later that afternoon.

Are they as good at photography as the old-time pro? Not usually. But they are good enough for what they need—and from a concept and style perspective know exactly how to get what they are looking for. Advertising photography is headed the same place that advertising typography went. The market will no longer support trained specialists. To make a career you need to combine photography, typography, design, layout, sometimes even coding and programming. These non-specialists may not be as good at any one thing as the old pros. But the best work that is coming out of ad agencies today is far superior to what was done a decade or two ago.

T. H Huxley, the 19th century evolutionist once wrote that if you gave infinite monkeys infinite typewriters they would create a masterpiece. It is upon this infinite monkey theorem that Andrew Keen begins his book ‘ The Cult of the Amateur except we bloggers or  so called amateurs are the monkeys and rather then creating a work of Shakespeare we are ‘creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.’

Throughout the book Keen continues to criticise and belittle nearly all the work of  bloggers and citizen journalists, as we are not always professionally trained in the areas that we choose to engage with. Please forgive me if I’m wrong but where do I get the professional training that teaches me how to generate an idea? Or develop an opinion? Just because I am not a ‘professional’ journalist or doctor does not mean that I cannot express my personal opinion about politics, economics or even having the chicken pox.

One of Keen’s largest concerns about the rise of the amateur is the loss of traditional objectivity and truth that has governed the operation of newspapers and the journalism profession in the past. He states that the political slant of newspapers is restricted to the op-ed page whereas the blogosphere is full of unsubstantiated statements, that are not checked by editors and that have no concern with providing the truth.

There is no denying that the blogosphere and citizen’s reporting of the news often presents biased perspectives that do not always strive for the objectivity level of many professional journalists. Furthermore, I agree with the fact people produce utter rubbish and lies but that does not justify a complete attack on all bloggers who are producing material on the internet. The problem of the spreading of  misinformation  is a major challenge that citizen journalists must attempt to overcome, perhaps through integrating elements of the profession into their practice such as the implementation of certain protocols or ethical standards.

It also worth noting that traditional top-down media sources are also always biased to some extent. All newspapers have a certain political slant, at the end of the day the title of any article comes down to one or a few people’s interpretation of the ‘truth’ which is no doubt influence by their cultural context and political beliefs.

Nevertheless, I agree that society needs some sort of professional institution to fulfill the guard dog role, acting as the fourth estate. But I don’t understand why the rise of the blogger or citizen journalist must be seen in opposition to the professional. Oppositional thinking is surely too simplistic. Our world is not black and white so why has this debate been reduced to the amateur versus the expert? I don’t think that the two have to be mutually exclusive.

After reading chapters of Keen denouncing blogging as being a simply self-referential act and a digital form of narcissism I decided to have a look at if he in fact he had a blog. The home page of his blog is a celebration of his elitism, it is filled with self-congratulatory statements of how inspiring he is. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

If Keen and other critics of the Web 2.o revolution are using its power to project their messages and opinions into the public sphere then surely they are being a tad hypocritical or do they have the right to express themselves because they have  formal education?

Perhaps now I am being too simplistic but we  obviously do not live in a classless society and an individual’s socio-economic status greatly influences their ability to access education. So if the Web 2.0 gives the voiceless in our society a voice and an opportunity to be heard then I think the experts should open their ears because they could learn a lot.

Anyway, I have to go finish grooming myself before my banana so I better stop typing. Maybe one of you other monkeys want to take over?

o vídeo tem 3 partes, assita a todas.

Andrew Keen é o autor do livro, lançado em 2007, Culto do Amador: Como Blogs, MySpace, YouTube e a pirataria digital estão destruindo nossa economia, cultura e valores. Ainda não li o livro, mas tá na listinha já. Mas enfim, assisti a entrevista e fiquei “meio cabreeeiro”. Achei muito raso o que ele falou sobre a wikipedia e adorei os questionamentos e considerações sobre o jornalismo e os modos de fazê-lo.

A Wikipedia é a maior enciclopédia do mundo e tem apenas 8 anos. Ela oferece mais de 3 milhões (e crescendo) de artigos em língua inglesa contra apenas 80 mil da Britannica (a maior enciclopédia impressa do mundo). Pode ser atualizada em tempo real por milhares de colaboradores, especialistas ou não. Se algo está errado, não é preciso esperar sair outra edição, ou comprar uma atualização, e esse é o grande trunfo dela. “(…) um estudo de 2005, efetuado pela revista Nature, periódico científico, relatou que, em 42 verbetes sobre tópicos científicos, constatou-se, em média, quatro erros por verbete na Wikipedia e três na Britannica.” (Anderson, C. CAUDA LONGA, p 66). Ao contrário da Britannica, que tem poucos revisores, a enciclopédia digital tem muitos, portanto é muito mais fácil de encontrar erros pelo caminho, e o melhor, é só clicar em “Edite está página” e corrigir. Então não é bem assim, apesar de não ter uma edição central, ela conta com esses milhares de colaboradores que estão verificando a veracidade de cada artigo.

O resto eu aceito, por enquanto, depois de ler o livro trago mais algumas considerações aqui. Fiquei pensando o quanto bravo Andrew Keen deve ficar com o Chris Anderson pelos seus dois livros, Cauda Longa e Free.

Week One: “A Brief History of the Internet” – Cathy began with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the consequences thereof. This seemed as a good a place as any as this event led to the development of DARPA by the US militaryand is also the starting point for http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/ 

As Cathy went through the various developmental stages of the internet as we know it today, I found myself thinking of  the internet in terms of human communication, which the Web is just the latest extension of. This helps me focus my brain on the other monkey on my back, the dreaded research proposal for this MA, – due Oct 30th. In addition the only text I had with me today is the “Antichrist of Silicon Valley” Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur . Which while appealing to the Luddite within me, may be hyperbole of the highest order (as you can tell I haven’t finished it yet!) Keen while deriding user-generated media and digital monkeys (I see a simian thread developing here) on digital typewriters he (naturally) has a website. http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/home/

Looking through Keen’s blogs it appears that he sees the accessibility to publishing a point of view not as democratic but rather the opposite ( according to modern mores, but not this author) that of a communist society. According to Wikipedia (of course a bug-bear to Keen) he  has stated that Web 2.0 ”worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer”.

For myself however, Keen’s is  an understandable viewpoint, after all I am trying to gain a Master degree that would qualify my status as a “professional” within the information world. On top of this, my research is dealing with ideas of information literacy, another strand of the bemoaning about the “Wiki-web”. Added to this I am admittedly inspired by other cautious voices regarding the quality of web-based information such as Tara Brabazon’s University of Google. Again though, I am seeing that the arguments about the “flattening of expertise” on the internet are not black or white (my Quakerism helps here), and I’m looking forward to how this module and Cathy’s overwhelming passion for the Net contributes to my views of this digital world.

Andrew Keen continues his crusade against the amoral and amorphous blob consuming us all, in today’s Telegraph.

While I find his particular brand of techno-pessimism a welcome counterweight to some of the techno-utopianism that exists out there, one or two aspects of today’s polemic (issues he raises time and time again) merit taking issue with. Namely:

As Clay Shirky argued last weekend at Ryerson University, the Internet has so confused and collapsed the distinction between audience and author that the ethical rules of the old economy no longer work. The old dichotomies of content and advertising, once governed from above by all-powerful, centralised organisations like the FTC and News Corp, have been made increasingly redundant by the internet.

The implied monopoly on ethical rules embraced by the ‘old economy’ frankly doesn’t line up with this surfer’s day-to-day experience, neither of new media nor old.

To imply that the Internet is a moral wasteland seething with swivel-eyed, loony-tune demagogues, and free-riding spongers, does a severe dis-service to the millions who contribute their well-reasoned opinions, expertise and knowledge.

There is also an implicit golden-ageism about the old media here, which just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Perhaps Andrew might further elaborate on just how ‘all-powerful’ the FTC has been historically, with regard to enforcing ethical standards on the US broadcasting media. For example, Commercial Alert, and Sourcewatch both provide several examples and research demonstrating the creep of product placement into news programming there.

Meanwhile, in the UK we have seen a clamour for reform of the Press Complaints Commission. A range of voices from outwith the old media (MediaWise) and within (The Media Standards Trust) are now using the Internet to mobilise, and hold old media to account on policing their ‘ethical rules’. These groups wouldn’t exist if everything in the garden were rosy.

While it is true that the online medium brings with it ethical challenges, to frame the changes we are living through as, in effect, barbarians storming the gate, does no credit either to the new media, nor the old.

Open communication and transparency should be at the centre of media standards. And online can be a very effective platform upon which to develop these virtues.

The “What’s Next for News?” discussion hosted by Globe and Mail tech writer Matthew Ingram at Ryerson University in Toronto last Friday (Oct. 2), which featured media futurist Clay Shirky and author/technologist Andrew Keen, though interesting revealed little with respect to the future of journalism.

That said it was definitely the place to be for befuddled journos looking for a guiding light in this unpredictable social media world. For evidence, look no further than the first two reserved rows of seats in the auditorium (students be damned) where a ‘who’s-who?’ of Canuck media types congregated to hear the insights of Shirky and Keen. These included former Toronto Star publisher John Honderich and the Globe’s head honcho Phil Crawley (no, Honderich was not wearing his trademark bow-tie).

Considering the historical shift that’s taking place in the media whereby the entire ecosystem is experiencing nothing short of a revolution, Keen called the media industry a bellwether for the rest of the world with respect to that change, in his opening comments.

Shirky recalled the general sense amongst mainstream media outlets in the late 1990s that suggested over time, they would adapt new Web tools and online publishing techniques and save themselves.

“There was a general sense that (the mainstream media) would get it right, that it was a matter of trying to figure out how to use these new tools and that there was nothing wrong with the core of the media model . . . I don’t believe that anymore,” he said. “The change will be more transformative; it will be so transformative that although they may still bear the same names, they will be unrecognizably different.

“In times of disruption, experimentation beats planning by a long shot.”

At one point, Shirky said there will always be a demand for legitimate journalism; for professionals to produce copy online that is verifiable by the writer’s identification and the organization they work for. That certainly got the bald and grey-haired heads in the front rows bobbing.

In the end, you already know the answer to the question ‘what is the future of journalism?’ It comes down to the individual. The tools are free, the opportunity is there; it’s up to you, tender reader/writer, to forge your own future. As former punk rock singer Jello Biafra once quipped, “don’t hate the media. Become the media.” Shirky and Keen would tell you much the same.

“It’s the journalist that holds all the cards,” Keen said. “I don’t see where the value of the Globe and Mail or the New York Times . . . is in this new economy if they can’t control the means of production.”

Though there was little room for questions from the peanut gallery, one man stood up and asked why the discussion required a Yank and a Brit to pontificate on the future of online media? (Shirky is American; Keen is British). Why weren’t there any Canucks in the know on the stage? (Ingram didn’t count he was told).

A bit harsh but a fair question; Keen agreed and turned it back to the audience: “Why isn’t Canada producing a Clay Shirky? Is it because of an absence of ability? Is it the education system? Or is it something in the system that lends itself to a tinier elite that is actually managing this system?”

No one answered but the crickets.

Acabo de ler esta notícia do The Business Insider (via @dtapscott) com o título Obama: We Need To Bail Out Newspapers Or Blogs Will Run The World. Em resumo, o Obama quer injetar dinheiro do governo nos jornais tradicionais, pois prevê que sem este apoio os blogs irão tomar conta e teme que o “amadorismo” dos blogs possam prejudicar a qualidade das informações.

Esse discurso de medo, encabeçado hoje principalmente por Andrew Keen, a uma suposta má qualidade dos materiais disponibilizados em blogs não soa nada além de uma tática de FUD. É óbvio e natural que, com a facilidade oferecida pelos blogs para que qualquer um seja um jornalista ou divulgue suas idéias para todo o mundo, muitas das informações disponibilizadas sejam duvidosas e/ou superficiais. Mas é absurdo simplesmente determinar que um conteúdo é superficial e amador apenas por estar em um formato de blog.

Como no nosso dia-a-dia, não confiamos em qualquer coisa que nos falam. Sabemos que há muitos mentirosos por aí, com diversos motivos para mentirem. Somos inteligentes o suficiente para discernir entre um conteúdo apresentado por alguém que verificou os fatos antes, do que alguém que simplesmente joga a informação sem ter certeza do que está falando. O fato de existerem uma massa enorme de blogs que não acrescentam valor ou simplesmente não são confiáveis não deve prejudicar o modelo.

O que acontece é uma seleção natural das minhas fontes de informação. Estou constantemente adicionando novas fontes de RSS de blogs de pessoas com ideias interessantes e ao mesmo tempo removendo alguns que provaram não serem confiáveis ou que não agregam nenhum valor à informação.

Apesar do enfraquecimento do modelo impresso, não dá para dizer que ele morreu. Os dois modelos devem co-existir e atingirem nichos e objetivos diferentes. O que precisa acontecer é uma adaptação dos jornais a esta nova realidade que vem se construíndo. Um bom exemplo disso é o reposicionamento de ninguém menos do que o New York Times, conforme noticiado pelo Tiago Dória com o post O jornal que não é mais jornal. Por outro lado, os jornais brasileiros Folha Online e O Globo servem como mau exemplo, ao tentar enrigecer os seus jornalistas contra as tendências na Internet, conforme noticiado pela Info.

Concluíndo, os blogs são sim uma ótima fonte de informações confiáveis e adaptadas ao nível de cada leitor. Eu já uso blogs e twitter como principal fonte de informação e me sinto tão bem ou melhor informado do que se utilizasse apenas o jornal impresso. Ainda vejo muito espaço para blogs e jornalistas profissionais e independetes crescerem. O que falta apenas é aceitar e testar este novo modelo. Não há nenhum meio melhor de provar isto do que adotando os blogs como fonte de informação.

by pj.rey

President Obama recently gave a eulogy for the legendary news anchor, Walter Cronkite, on which occasion, he delivered the nation this message:

We know that this is a difficult time for journalism. Even as appetites for news and information grow, newsrooms are closing.  Despite the big stories of our era, serious journalists find themselves all too often without a beat.  Just as the news cycle has shrunk, so has the bottom line. [...] Naturally, we find ourselves wondering how he would have covered the monumental stories of our time. In an era where the news that city hall is on fire can sweep around the world at the speed of the Internet, would he still have called to double-check?  Would he have been able to cut through the murky noise of the blogs and the tweets and the sound bites to shine the bright light on substance?  Would he still offer the perspective that we value?  Would he have been able to remain a singular figure in an age of dwindling attention spans and omnipresent media?

The president waxed romantically about the old media and spoke with the sort fondness that one expects at the funeral of an old friend (or cherished institution).  He was hopeful about the future of conventional media.  But, eulogies are a post-mortum affair.  And, for all the president’s accolades, “the murky noise of the blogs and the tweets and the sound bites” appear to have won the day.

In fact, these days, one can hardly avoid stories about the death of print media.  Last December, the Chicago Tribune filed for bankruptcy. Shortly thereafter, Michael Hirschorn warned that “End Times” might be drawing near for the America’s paper of record.  A recent article reports that the crisis is spreading to other forms of conventional reporting such as photojournalism.  Michael Bowden has even gone so far as to announce that we have entered a “post-journalistic age.”

Two explanations for the crisis in the conventional media have been circulated by none other than the the conventional media itself.  Both share the same theme: blame the consumer!

The first explanation posits that Americans these days are just plain dopes.  This argument has a venerable history among media critics and has been a central theme in such diverse works as Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and Andrew Keen’s recent The Cult of the Amateur.  In its modern incarnation, the assumption is that a less intelligent society naturally consumes less quality reporting, thus diminishing support for the industry.

The second explanation holds that people have been seduced by the allure of free content on the web and now expect all information to be free.  These latter critics believe that a generation is emerging who have seldom, if ever, paid for content and simply lack the basis from which to judge the quality of various information venues.  Wired magazine editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, discusses the technological innovations which influence changing attitudes toward content in a new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, though he is not so pessimistic about the implications of “free” for the quality of content.

Regardless of their truth or falsity, such theories totally miss the overwhelming structural forces at play in the crisis of conventional media.  The real threat to these institutions has little to do with taste or educational development.  Rather, it is, largely, economic.  The concept of “prosumption” has already been addressed several times on this blog, but as a refresher: prosumption refers human activity that combines aspects of both consumption and production.  And, it is prosumption that most threatens the business model of the conventional media.  Why?  Because prosumption best serves the principles of capitalism in which the various form of media compete.

The increasing presence of prosumptive activities in our daily lives (most notably as a result of the important role that the Internet now in the lives of most people) has meant that people are busy doing free labor on a scale unimaginable to previous generations.  Put simply, prosumption is more efficient.(also, see this previous post)  By efficiency, I do not mean that more quality/quantity of unique content is produce with less labor.  On the contrary, prosumption is less productive.  Bloggers, Twitters, and other online posters produce extraordinary amounts of (often redundant) content, but the end result is that more work produces less information of value to society.  The blogosphere may require a thousands times the labor and laborers it takes for one newspaper to break the same number of stories.  But how, then, is the blogosphere more efficient?

The answer lies in the Marxian concept of exploitation.  For Marx, exploitation had a very specific meaning:  the amount of value that the capitalist extracts from a laborer’s activity.  If we accept Marx’s definition then we might say: exploitation is more efficient when the capitalist is able to capitalize on a greater proportion of the laborer’s labor and returns less to the laborer in the form of wages.  Thus, the most efficient mode of organization would be one where the capitalist capitalizes on the laborer’s labor and returns nothing in the form of wages.  This maximized state of efficiency describes what we find occurring on the Internet today.  It is more efficient to not pay a hundred people to do a job than to pay one person to do that job.  And, it is with this most basic logic of capitalism that the private conventional media must compete.  So far, they are losing.

If the public wants to retain the quality of these traditional venues, I suggest we rapidly examine alternative funding models such as NPR’s or the BBC’s, which continue to remain successful, in part, because they simply remain outside the logic of capitalism.  Without quick action, I fear many of these conventional media institutions will be dismantled beyond repair.

Obama on a “Difficult Time for Journalism”

“Exploitation,” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, Andrew Kliman, ed. George Ritzer

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Andrew Keen, såsom han presenteras i det... hupp, användargenererade uppslagsverket Wikipedia

En av de frågor som då och då kommer upp när jag föreläser om Wikipedia, den fria encyklopedin, handlar om en bok som fått något av ett kultrykte, Andrew Keens The cult of the amateur. Eftersom jag inte har läst den (eller tusentals andra böcker – trots att jag läser omkring 50 böcker om året), brukar jag svara ganska undflyende på specifika saker i Keens kritik om att Web 2.0 skulle döda vår kultur. Jag kan förstås dra en del motargument och det brukar jag göra, men det var inte förrän jag läste en recension på webbplatsen Reason som jag verkligen förstod vad det stora problemet i Keens kritik var. Recensionen finns här och är skriven i januari 2008 av David Harsanyi. Jag vet att det var ett tag sedan, men man kan inte alltid upptäcka allting direkt. (I själva verket är det väl alltid frågan om en viss eftersläpning.)

Keen menar att alla bloggar och Wikipedia, ja, allt användargenererat material (till exempel den här bibliografisajten eller det här länkskafferiet, gissar jag) dränker det professionellt skapade materialet. Dagens nyheter kan inte skrika lika högt som Sveriges alla bloggare och därför kommer DN snart tvingas lägga ner, verkar Keen påstå. “Och då kommer ni att ångra er” misstänker man att Keen lägger till.

Nu är situationen givetvis mer komplicerad än vad Keen vill ge sken av. Till och med en så bra blogg som Internetbrus är ju bara en blogg, användargenererad av personer som inte är betalda för att skriva inläggen. Man kan givetvis påstå att det är ett exempel på en bra blogg, men att det finns många fler dåliga än det finns bra. Det må vara hänt, men samma sak gäller för tidningar, böcker och för den delen artiklar i uppslagsverk. För dem som följde den sista länken och blev förvånade över vad som fanns där, kan jag förtydliga med att jag gillar Nordisk familjebok, men att den trots allt är hopplöst utdaterad. Jag upprepar helt enkelt vad jag skrev för ett tag sedan, situationen med bloggar är inte annorlunda än så mycket annat i livet – man får ta det med en nypa salt, vara källkritisk och ta det goda med det onda.

Förresten, missa inte Harsanyis artikel. Den är riktigt bra och tar upp mycket mer än jag gör i det här blogginlägget. Här fanns den, som sagt.

Andrew Keen stelt in het eerste hoofdstuk van zijn boek de democratisering van het internet aan de kaak en wat voor invloed dat heeft op het internet. De democratisering van het internet houdt in dat ‘’de amateur’’ aan de macht komt. De amateur bepaalt wat er op een website komt te staan. Andrew vindt dit zeer spijtig, hij stelt namelijk: elke geflopte recordlabel, ontslagen journalist, failliete boekhandel komt door “gratis” user-generated internet content. Hij stelt ook dat iedereen op het web vandaag de dag gelijk is, dus verdwijnt specialisme en individuele kwaliteiten. Een amateur die zijn mening geeft over een nieuw boek of een nieuwe cd kan je niet vergelijken met die van een professional die voor zijn mening jaren heeft gestudeerd en ervaringen heeft opgedaan. Hier ben ik het mee eens, alleen vind ik niet dat je alle user-generated content van amateurs kan afschrijven als slecht. Dit is wel wat Andrew doet hij scheert alle amateurs over een kant, hier ben ik het niet mee eens. Inmiddels vervaagt de grens tussen specialisten en amateurs nu. De wet van de sterkste geld wie het hardst schreeuwt krijgt het meeste aandacht. Andrew vreest ook voor de waarheid op het web. Hoe weet je, dat wat op wikipedia staat de waarheid is? Als je naar een wiki-pagina gaat van al qa’ida, hoe weet je dan wie dat heeft geschreven? Misschien wel de CIA die al qa’ida als ultieme vijand van de VS wil neerzetten. Misschien een beetje extreem gesteld maar het probleem is dat er geen controle plaats vindt. Dit vind ik zelf ook een zeer kwalijke zaak. Kinderen die nu opgroeien nemen de feiten op wikipedia aan als waarheid. Dit is een punt waar veel meer maatschappelijke en politieke aandacht voor moet komen. Als we daar nu niet iets aan doen dan kan het te laat zijn voor de generaties die we nalaten.

Laurens Hofstede CC1-V1

Andrew Keen

La famosa coda lunga, quant’è lunga in realtà? Secondo Andrew Keen più la coda è lunga, più è facile che rimanga schiacciata in una porta. Hollywood è in crisi e dobbiamo aspettarci una “biblioteca di Babele”. Linka oggi, linka domani chi darà la pappa ai cani? Tanto va la gatta al lardo (o al largo?), campa cavallo che l’erba cresce.

E  Chad Hurley cosa dice? Lo dice il nome stesso: Chad Hurley urla.

Submitted by E. Rich (GraphicSilence.com)

In part of Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur, he discusses how web 2.0 is killing traditional media and businesses by all of the “free” user generated content on the internet.  These traditional outlets of media cannot sustain themselves when the internet provides the same services for free.   Keen believes that

“perhaps the biggest casualties of the Web 2.0 revolution are real businesses with real products, real employees, and real shareholders…. Every defunct record label, or laid off newspaper reporter, or bankrupt independent bookstore is a consequence of “free” user generated internet content – from Craiglist’s free advertising, to YouTube’s free music videos, to Wikipedia’s free information.”

The biggest casualty for me is the dwindling number of newspapers in the country.   I grew up reading the newspaper with my parents every morning and this is very disheartening.  Local newspapers are filing for bankruptcy all over the country.  For instance in late 2008, the Tribune Company, who owns the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune,  filed for bankruptcy due to debt and falling ad revenue. This is just one of many companies that have filed for bankruptcy in the past two years.  Advertisers and readers are increasingly turning to online alternatives for ad revenue and news.

This is troubling for us all in that real journalists and newspapers are not receiving the attention that they deserve.  The internet has dubious amounts of information and questionable authors/bloggers, depending on who you read and what you read and I believe there can be a discrepancy in reliable information.  Now of course, my instinct is to proclaim that newspapers and traditional media must get with the times and adapt to technological evolution in regards to media so they won’t die, but it doesn’t seem that easy.  Providing their news source online is a step in that direction, but the majority of newspapers have not made a big transformation yet online.  Some sites, like the Houston Chronicle, are hard to navigate intentionally so their readers will be forced to by the hard copy.

The internet is distracting people from traditional media and it’s hard to tell if this is a positive or negative thing.  I enjoy reading the newspaper as opposed to reading articles online.  Mainly, because it’s easier to read and to navigate.  I can spend time looking over the newspaper versus clicking a bunch of links and skimming.  I also read a wider range of news from a local newspaper versus cherry picking online articles.

The internet is transforming our society and how we receive our news.  It’s important to me that the information on the internet that people read is credible.  It’s important that we have established journalists or at least good objective writers and accurate information.  With so many people turning to the internet for news, we will all have different versions of news by who we read and where are affiliations and beliefs lie.  Plus, we will have a perpetual amount of slush of bad information.  This phenomenon happens in traditional media too, but it’s maximized on the internet by an infinite amount of content that may or may not be truthful, objective, credible, or reliable.  My only hope is that a consequence of the internet is not having traded quality for misinformation, but then again, it all depends on the user.

While the internet is a great commodity, making our everyday lives easier, it is far from perfect. One of the main problems with the internet today is anonymity and credibility. According to Andrew Keen in his article, The Great Seduction (in The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, “the real consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information” (16). Furthermore, Keen adds, “When advertising and public relations are disguised as news, the line between fact and fiction becomes blurred. Instead of more community, knowledge, or culture, all that Web 2.0 really delivers is more dubious content from anonymous sources, hijacking our time and playing to our gullibility” (15). Or in other words, the Internet has become a cesspool of information thrown in by anonymous sources many of which cannot be trusted.

A great example of how credibility and anonymity have become a problem is Wikipedia. While Wikipedia provides great information, not all of it is accurate, and most of the time, you have no idea who wrote it. Some random person with a lot of free time and no knowledge of what their talking about can easily get on Wikipedia and edit and whatever they want. They can easily distort facts, or just write something completely irrelevant and untrue. It becomes the reader’s job of determining whether something is factual or not.

This lack of credibility on sites such as Wikipedia, creates problems for the average user of the internet. It turns the user into a filter. Rather than having internal filters on the website, filtering out potentially untrue information, and bad sources, the user is now in control of determining the credibility of the information they have found. This becomes a problem for the uneducated user who has no idea, that the information their viewing is falsified.

Furthermore, anonymity becomes even more of problem on social networking sites, like Twitter, and Facebook. On these sites, it is very easy for an experienced user, to falsify information about themselves, lie about their name, or pretend to be someone their not. These users can then friend, or follow you, without you having any idea that they’re not the person they say they are. This becomes a major concern when the user begins to engage in harmful activities, such as stalking, or harassment.

While anonymity may be a major problem with Web 2.0, it is certainly not the only one. Like the issues, with credibility, and anonymity, amateurism is becoming a growing concern as well. It is mainly becoming a problem, because so many people are now able to fully participate, and create content on the internet, that their “voices”, are drowning out those of the professionals. As Keen states in his article, “what was [is] governing the infinite monkeys [people] now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated.” So many people are now creating on the internet, trying to be the loudest and most opinionated, that the voices of experts, and professionals, people with something of value to say, are going by unheard, and unnoticed.

Clearly, Web 2.0 is not perfect. With issues over credibility and anonymity it’s clear that the internet has a host of problems that still need to be worked out. However, I believe that the potential benefits of Web 2.0 greatly outweigh the potential problems.

As Relações Públicas, tal como todo o debate intelectual contemporâneo, vivem abismadas pela omnipresença das novas tecnologias, ou não fossem resultado de trabalho quase instantâneo e desenvolvido sob pressão, não podendo deixar de usufruir das frutuosas ferramentas disponibilizadas pela Internet. Renascidos da Era da Informação, vivemos agora na Era da Atenção, tempo em que os indivíduos deixam de ser meros receptores de informação fabricada pelos media de massa e passam a poder, para além de consumir, criar e partilhar mais informação, mais depressa e com mais liberdade. As Relações Públicas têm de se adaptar aos novos media: as redes sociais.

Como explica Richard Bailey, autor do post “Brands, Relationships and Social Capital”, há actualmente um enorme fosso entre a postura típica do mercado – de esperar lucros imediatos de qualquer campanha de marketing, publicidade ou relações públicas – e a necessidade efectiva de apostar nos “social media”[1] afim de produzir capital social – investimentos a longo prazo. É apontado no post que apesar de haver cada vez mais “marcas”[2] nos “social media”, a atitude com que neles se inserem não será de investimento mas sim de experiência e se, como facilmente se prevê, os resultados não forem imediatos, temem os críticos que se desista demasiado depressa desta potencial ferramenta de trabalho. Se as Relações Públicas assentam na construção de uma relação de confiança com os seus públicos (ie stakeholders), os “social media” apresentam-se como um ponto estratégico de extrema importância para concretizar os objectivos de uma campanha, visto que através do diálogo e da interacção entre as duas partes, é mais fácil criar alicerces “construídos sobre uma troca mútua de valores ao longo do tempo”[3]. Tais suportes tornam mais fácil alcançar o público-alvo da campanha tendo capacidades para abranger o mesmo número de pessoas ou até um número superior do que os media industriais[4], sendo que apresentam ainda vantagens no que toca à acessibilidade (estão sempre disponíveis, a qualquer hora, em qualquer lugar), à liberdade de produção (são baratos ou gratuitos), à novidade (é possível actualizar a informação quase instantaneamente) e à permanência (ao contrário do que acontece ao que é publicado num jornal ou transmitido numa rádio ou televisão, o que está na Web não é finito: é possível alterar, responder e comentar a informação disponível em qualquer altura). Ora, esta evolução torna a velocidade de legitimação ou destruição de uma marca, empresa, organização, pessoa ou ideia muito mais rápida.

Esta possibilidade de diálogo e respectivas vantagens trazidas pelos “social media” elevam ao expoente máximo os princípios de que Richard Bailey fala no post “The Currency of the Web is Attention and Reputation”: os de uma “sociedade livre suportada pela liberdade de expressão, liberdade de imprensa e eleições ‘livres e justas’”[5]. Enquanto que a relação existente actualmente entre as Relações Púbicas e os media – “dar informação gratuita esperando cobertura mediática grátis em troca”[6] – é não raras vezes criticada por ser camuflada aos olhos do público, a relação baseada nos princípios referidos é intensamente aplaudida. Os “social media” tornam-na numa realidade fortemente elogiada pelo autor e outros teóricos das Relações Públicas, sendo que consideram justos e úteis os métodos de avaliação do sucesso de uma campanha, o tal “termo de pagamento”[7] da Web – a Atenção e a Reputação. Ora, se a legitimação de uma marca, empresa, organização, pessoa ou ideia depende do número de visitas ou do tráfico de um site (que medem a Atenção) e do número de links que para ele apontam (que medem a Reputação), considero este sistema de aumento de autoridade extremamente falível por ser tão facilmente manipulável. Fazendo apenas uma transição, muda-se de uma estratégia disfarçada (a tal troca de informação entre as Relações Públicas e os media de massa) para outra igualmente reprovável.

Assim, apesar de concordar com o autor do blog ‘PR Studies’ quando fala no investimento a longo prazo nestas redes sociais, parece-me que a abordagem deve ser cautelosa por duas principais razões: primeiro, porque no que toca à linguagem Web 2.0[8], somos completos analfabetos, a retórica é completamente diferente (juntar em harmonia imagem, vídeo, som e escrita não é, de todo, o meio em que nos sentimos à vontade, tratando-se de um trabalho que precisa de ser aperfeiçoado); segundo, porque o mundo dos blogs, das redes sociais, da partilha de ficheiros multimédia e das mensagens instantâneas ainda não tem regras definidas. Tendo havido um tão significativo aumento da liberdade, é preciso reflectir sobre a responsabilidade que a acompanha, ou entramos por completo no universo descrito pelo crítico Andrew Keen: “Nesta anarquia, tornou-se de repente claro que o que governava os infinitos macacos que agora inserem informação na Internet é o Darwinismo digital, a sobrevivência do mais barulhento e mais teimoso. Com estas regras, a única maneira de prevalecer intelectualmente é sendo um incansável flibusteiro”[9]. Tendo os prós e os contras conscientemente delineados, julgo que é necessário perseguir o progresso e agarrar a oportunidade de estabelecer novas regras e objectivos mais ambiciosos e, assim, a solução para o crescimento das Relações Públicas será o título de outro post deste blog: “Construir uma rede, não uma empresa”[10].

Joana Tadeu