Warning - this is my first attempt at liveblogging in a while…

Very happy to have been able to make it to downtown San Francisco to see this great session at Supernova featuring David Weinberger talking about his book Everything is Miscellaneous and Andrew Keen talking about his book The Cult of the Amateur. According to the session description,

Disorder: Feature or Bug?
(Andrew Keen, David Weinberger)
A debate about the value of authority in a connected world. The greatest business challenge that the New Network poses for many companies is also a fundamental social challenge. The old categories, boundaries, hierarchies, and scarcities are being swept away. To what extent is that a good thing, and to what extent is it a threat to what we truly value?

Though there were a lot of great sessions I wanted to attend, most notably Jerry Michalski and Deborah Schultz’s Markets and Relationships Track on Challenge Day, this session, IMHO, was the most important.

David started with a presentation covering the central premise of his book, that the world is messy and this is good - it creates more interesting ways to get at and discover information, creating more opportunity, more democracy and more equality. Andrew was presenting his case for authority and his concerns that the digital world we live in today is reminiscent of the middle ages. That we need authority and that the views held by the digital utopians are dangerously hurting our society. While some of his arguments are sound, I believe they are fundamentally flawed because he speaks about the ‘mass society’ but doesn’t really trust it. This is very complex and I want to go deeper into this in the near future when not live blogging.

Pt 1 - David says Andrew’s remarks were similar to arguments against the digital divide, but Andrew would be more upset than happy if it came true - Andrew challenged David to define how someone is determined to be a cultural authority. David asked Andrew some very direct questions, which he did not answer, changing the subject, but Keven Werbach redirected Andrew to show relevance.

Pt 2 - Andrew says there is an “anonymous oligarchy” with a “small group of activists who are driving this new democracy” - that his is his fundamental problem. David points out that his book acknowledges the very fact that there is a new democratization as an opposite to the existing authority. Andrew says his concern is that no one is reading it, and that the “people need experts to inform and educate and this media is not doing it.” David says the Web is “more of everything” - including more of the experts like Mortimer - “more Mortimer, expertise, crap, racism, love and Clay Shirky”. Andrews says “this is a media not providing authority, people need expertise, guides, sign posts and a way to determine authority.”

David agrees, “we do need to address it, largely because our education systems have failed it from being too stuffy.” David say “I can find the copy of Cicero, but I cant find the great work that is being worked on today - the one’s that the library’s can’t hold because the works are too big, the one’s I can’t find in a scarce world.”
“We are richer than that today.”

Andrew disagrees, acknowledging that his book over-glamorizes mass media more than it should - but that it has “done a good job discovering, packaging and selling content.” Continuing on to say that there was nothing wrong with the media business as it existed, but “now we have suddenly realized we have to revive it” - “that we have to reinvent the wheel.”

Mitch Ratcliffe asked, “what are the things you can agree upon that will help us measure how well are we doing?” Andrew said they both share the same “social and political justice and ideals, but I am less optimstic about the flattened world bringing us to more democratization.” Andrew believes in hierarchies and taxonomies - Wikipedia is more or less right, but the problem is “that no single person is in charge of determining what is right.”

Tom Mandel “Authority is not derived from any real form of expertise, the Rolling Stones get their authority from charisma and the Queen of England gets hers from Tradition.”

Liz “cultural authority does not go away because there are more voices”.

Addressing the issue of scarcity of talent, a gentleman said “talent tends to appear when it has opportunities to grow” - “have you considered how talent is really developed?”

Andrew does not believe that “the current media system is rooted in privilege” - “the current media system is meritocratic” - does not think “people are being born into positions of privilege”. He apparently has not seen the movies that Stephen Baldwin has done…

Closing:

David pointed to “the canadian guy and the wikipedia guy” contentions that the real impact arises from talent within network effects…

Keen says “it is the job of mainstream media to find raw talent and polish it up” - that “raw talent is not real”

Tags: supernova supernova2007 andrewkeen davidweinberger kevinwerbach sanfrancisco 22june2007