The Space Between

Criticism: Flattening Culture

The applications of hypertext that computer users see every day, the Internet and World Wide Web, have the potential to let them create the global village Marshall McLuhan writes about in The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan says that in that kid of community, social structures like the state and university become pointless. Borders are gradually erased by providing everyone with equal access and equal opportunity. The outcome, some predict, is technological utopia powered by user-generated culture. It is an idea that is not without its critics.

“The Web 2.0 dream is Socrates’s nightmare,” writes Andrew Keen, “technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.” A strong critic of user-created content, Keen says that the move towards a wreaderly Web “worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer.” He relies on comparisons to Plato’s infamous banning of poets from his Republic and on comparisons to Marxist communism to make a simple point: when people are allowed to do whatever they like, when a society permits them the leeway to do anything, the result is a community lacking in cultural depth and sophistication (Keen).

Keen’s chief argument, upon which he will elaborate in his forthcoming book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, is that the traditional trappings of culture—film, literature, art, and music—will cease to reflect the world around us and begin to be highly personalized. Keen sees it happening already. Social networking sites like MySpace encourage social interaction, but the user chiefly interacts with his own page. Bloggers spend the most time organizing their own page instead of reading others’ blogs. Shoppers on Amazon.com have personalized selections presented to them, tailored to fit their habits. Search engines are even beginning to get in on the act, learning from a user’s past searches to provide “more relevant” results (and advertsing).

Examples abound, and Keen determines from them that Web users will see less and less of the world as others see it. He believes this will lead to a flatter cultural landscape and, ultimately, even more space between people and a more fractured world. His argument echoes in part what Walter Benjamin writes in his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin says that works of art have always been reproducible, but that mechanization added something new to the mix. The work of art is removed from the presence of the viewer in both “time and space” (1107). Moreover, mechanical reproduction removes art from ritual: “To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproduction” (1110). Benjamin and Keen both argue that this is a reversal of art’s function. For Benjamin, art becomes political. For Keen, art becomes common, vulgar. In both cases, technology removes the mystery and magic from art.