To Hell in a Handbasket: Andrew Keen Monologues on the Dangers of Social Media

I've written on Andrew Keen's view of social media before on ContentBlogger, so it was interesting to get another dose of his monologue on what media ought to be at the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. He continues to promote the concept that people equipped with powerful publishing tools should lay down their arms and go back to being passive audiences. Needless to say I take a different view of things, but what I find to be most curious was his fear that the rise of social media would somehow eliminate traditional media outlets. Everything to date seems to indicate that many traditional media companies are doing very well when they begin to adapt to the power of social media as part of their quiver of capabilities. It's a matter of understanding that new business models can make more money using social media effectively in new ways. This doesn't mean that there will always be a one-to-one transfer of revenues, but there will be rich business models that will include professionals as well as so-called amateurs comfortably.

A good and simple example of that might be found in two of the companies who are presenting on my panel today. Jigsaw, a business information company, provides information on business contacts that people collect in their rounds in the business world. Now, if I am the first person who got Joe Smith's new business card, why on earth would it benefit someone else to wait days or weeks to get that information through a publisher's traditional publishing cycle? In the instance of ECNext's Manta people can update their business profiles far more regularly and rapidly than a traditional business information database would afford.

Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair of Elsevier, showed in his presentation that came after Mr. Keene's how one of the leading scientific publishers is using out-of-the-box wiki technology to enable medical experts to build their own sources of medical knowledge collaboratively - and chatted about how he was using his own Facebook page. So this matter of the audience being a group who should sit down and consume content from traditional publishers passively can be rather a red herring. The audience could be anyone - including the head of a major media company - collaborating with friends and colleagues to create value in publishing. Social media communities can control who contributes to them in any number of ways, and in doing so create vibrant and valuable content.

Listenting to Mr. Keene again I must say that it has only confirmed my sense that his marketing of his "cult of the amateur" stance is really just a shtick, a gimmick that enables him to get media attention on the opposite side of an issue when people are looking for someone to argue from the other side of the table. If you have "n" number of people clamoring to tell people how great social media is and not many (or any, in many instances) on the other side of the table arguing the opposite, how better to make money and gain influence amongst influential figures in the media than to bash social media? Even at the expense of telling a story accurately? It works for some people in other media circles such as political punditry, why not for the coverage of the media industry itself?

In chapter three of the book I'll be outlining with your help how media, enterprise and personal publishers are all going to benefit from social media - if they can all accept that they all have a legitimate right to consider one another legitimate publishers. Social media is not about communism or some other emotionally charged models that people like Mr. Keene might invoke but about people recognizing that value in publishing comes on many different levels. I wish Mr. Keene good luck with his book tour, but I suspect that he will find his role as a mouthpiece for those afraid of the power of social media to transform our work, our lives and our future to be rather limiting.