Big Noise At The Lake Of Many Winds

In a few days I will journey to the improbably named Couchiching Conference to do battle with Andrew Keen on behalf of citizen journalism.

Of course, every time I tell this to friends or relatives, they start giggling at the mention of Lake Couchiching and miss the gist.

Well, Couchiching is a perfectly legitimate Huron word for “Lake of Many Winds” and this is the 77th edition of the conference itself, the annual thinkfest and place where in 1947, the idea for NATO, the military alliance of North Atlantic nations, was born.

So, hilarity aside, it’s a good place to debate citizen journalism: in one corner, Andrew Keen, famous – or notorious – as the author of The Cult of The Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, and in the other corner: me, defender of the notion that citizen journalism is the future of democracy.

The debate, which is being touted by conference organizers as a good old-fashioned high school debate, starts with me defending citizen journalism, followed by Keen shredding me to bits, followed by me retorting, stung, followed by Keen, shredding me to bits.

Good clean fun for nerds.

A walk through Keen’s book confirms he has a low opinion of citizen journalism: the digital revolution, he contends, is “ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule…on steroids”.

He compares the denizens of the blogosphere and citizen journalism sites such as Orato.com to the proverbial pack of infinite monkeys: if you supply infinite monkeys with typewriters, eventually one will write a play by Shakespeare or a dialogue by Plato.

The trouble with this lot of Internet Users, however, is that “instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys – many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins – are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.”

So stop right there before you add to that steaming pile of digital mediocrity!

You can find out more about what Andrew Keen thinks right here on Orato.com. Read How The Internet And Innocence Kill Culture or Web 2.0 Critic Andrew Keen On The BBC Layoffs. We thought you would be interested in a school of thought that completely rejects what we’re trying to do.

As you may suspect, I’m not about to break down and agree with Andrew Keen, who selectively admires quality professional journalism and scoffs at citizen journalism.

“Citizens don’t report; professional journalists report”, Keen’s six-word summary of the value of citizen journalism, betrays an almost naïve view of the current standards of professional journalism coupled with a scold’s disdain.

I realize that citizen journalism is an emerging form of communication, full of flaws and potential for error and abuse, not to mention plain old mediocrity. But a brief survey of the stories on this site shows there’s plenty of cause for excitement and optimism, even if you indulge in nostalgia for the good old days of professional journalism. And please, let’s not get too reverential.

As someone who spent 30 years in some of Canada’s most trusted professional newsrooms, I have a detailed picture of how much of mainstream journalism, at least in Canada, has become a ritualized facsimile of objectivity and fact-finding that misses the truth as often as it hits and, more often than not, enshrines error and omission in the archive for years to come.

Citizen journalism exists for two reasons: one, because we, the infinite monkeys, have the technology, and two, we’ve been failed by mainstream journalism. Faith in the mainstream is at an all-time low, thanks to decades of panic mongering (if it bleeds, it leads), “celebrity journalism”, propaganda masquerading as objective journalism, and advertising masquerading as truth.

I’m just starting to get wound up, but I better save it for the debate. I let you know how it went when I get back from the “Lake of Many Winds”, which, upon reflection, could not have been more aptly named.