words online

I'm so late to the litblog panel after-party that I'm not even sure it's worth showing up, but I said I'd be there, it's on my way home, etc. For those of you who weren't there, the panel consisted of the four people above - Carolyn Kellogg of Pinky's Paperhaus, moderator Tod Goldberg, enfant terrible Andrew Keen, and Ron Hogan of Beatrice and Galley Cat.

I think everyone's in agreement that Andrew Keen acted like (is?) an elitist bully who wasn't interested in anyone else's thoughts on his main thesis: the internet is killing our culture (a.k.a. "the corrupting consequences of the democratization of media"). I find his attitude unfortunate because he is doing something that needs to be done: theorizing the future of the internet.

This doesn't mean that his idea that people aren't smart enough to tell good lit reviews from bad isn't spurious and insulting. Yet as I write this, I think about the students I teach online who are shocked (shocked!) that Wikipedia may not be an entirely reliable academic source. Things may not be as black and white as Keen would like us to believe. While Wikipedia is one of the most useful research tools a student could hope to find and I would go so far as to say the world is a smarter place for it, the cost of the dissemination of false information needs to be considered, even if in the end, it is dismissed as irrelevant.

Keen's other main point on Sunday - that bloggers are giving their content away for free in a bad business model that will eventually lead to their ruin - was equally overstated and almost immediately dated. The discussion is not necessarily whether or not the content should be free; it's how we manage this free content in a way that benefits both the content provider and recipient. Keen's idea that all "quality" content should have a price tag is abhorrent when I once again think about my online students who struggle to scrape together tuition payments. How can we even think about telling them that they'll also need to run up their credit card debt just to get some decent online reading material?

Obviously, the panel was on literary blogs and there was a focus on the question of whether blogs are destroying print media or the print medium is destroying itself. Keen has some thoughts on how our current print book reviews are adequate, which isn't even worth debating. I'd love to see figures on how much more lucrative book publishing has become for all authors now that online outlets like lit blogs can turn from the proscribed literary fiction chosen by the industry giants toward oftentimes more deserving, lesser known titles.

Favorite quote (tie, both from Ron Hogan):

"If I wanted to get rich, I certainly wouldn't be talking about books."

"There's a lot of shit to wade through, but there's a pony in there."