Andrew Keen, my favourite Web 2.0 iconoclast (which is Latin for “almost always wrong”), has a typically irascible blog post in response to a New York Times article on Radiohead over the weekend. Andrew’s point — stay with me here — is that by offering its own music through its own website directly to fans, the British band is doing the entire music business a disservice, and we should all be outraged.

This is classic Keen. He’s asking us to support a business model that virtually anyone with a pulse — including many of those who work in the industry, including rapper 50 Cent — knows is fundamentally broken, and to side with the members of that industry rather than the actual artists whose work is the lifeblood of the business, but who are routinely taken advantage of by that industry. In fact, he’s not just asking us to do that, he’s incensed at the idea that anyone would do otherwise.

This is a little like getting mad at a painter who decides to show his or her work privately and then sell the paintings to whoever wants them. How dare they do this? What about the poor art gallery representatives, and the dealers? In fact, you could substitute just about any creative professional or “content creator” for Radiohead in this case — author, dancer, celebrity chef — and Keen’s argument looks just as absurd.

The fact is that Radiohead is still supporting all of the people who matter: In other words, themselves, their loved ones, their roadies and sound engineers and studio professionals. As usual, Keen wants us to sympathize with the infrastructure instead of the actual creative people within that infrastructure. Why? Because he’s Andrew Keen, that’s why.

Jason Kottke of kottke.org has been taking some well-deserved time off and having guest writers post things to his blog, and one of the most recent ones was an interview that Joe Turnipseed (aka writer Joel Hernandez) did with thinker Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks. Among other things, Benkler talks about the diversity of voices that the Internet makes possible, and how that can be both a good thing and a bad thing.

In that sense, his comments are a great riposte to the gloomy views of Andrew “the Internet is killing culture” Keen, who has been on a bit of a roadshow since his book came out. There are others who also make great anti-Keen arguments, including David “Everything is Miscellaneous” Weinberger — who did a great one-on-one dismantling of Keen’s viewpoint in the Wall Street Journal not long ago — but Benkler is among the best.

Turnipseed asks about the discussion of Benkler’s book that has been taking place at the website Crooked Timber, and says that his understanding of the author’s arguments was helped by reading some of the commentary and debate at the site. Benkler responds:

“I thought the discussion on Crooked Timber was in fact excellent, as good a discussion as you would get in a thoughtful seminar, whether academic or whenever you get a collection of thoughtful people in a book club.

There should be nothing surprising about this, any more than there should be anything surprising about there being blogs that are utter nonsense.”

Benkler makes the point that the “networked information economy” allows a billion people to produce and communicate information and knowledge, and so it effectively widens the range of viewpoints and knowledge levels that are available — which can be both good and bad.

“The probability that any newspaper, however well-heeled, will be able to put together the kind of legal analytic brainpower that my friend Jack Balkin has put together on his blog, Balkinization, is zero. They can’t afford it.

On the other hand, even the Weekly World News is tame and mainstream by comparison to the quirkiness or plain stupidity some people can exhibit. The range is simply larger. That’s what it means to have a truly diverse public sphere.”

And Benkler’s next comment on the topic seems an almost direct shot across the bow of people such as Keen — and his partner in crime, Nick Carr — who argue that an intellectual and cultural elite should continue to dominate media and culture (for our own good, of course):

“If you want to find evidence of nonsense — as of course it is important to people whose sense of self-worth depends on the special role traditional mass media play in the public sphere — you will easily find it.

If you want to find the opposite, that too is simple. What’s left is to wait and see over time whether one overwhelms the other.”

I would agree with Benkler that the evidence of both is plentiful, and that when it comes to which will win, I am firmly on the optimistic side. As he puts it, his ultimate conclusion in the book was that:

“While the networked public sphere was not the utopia some in the early 1990s would have liked it to be, it was certainly an appreciable and important improvement over the industrial, mass media structure of the public sphere in the century and a half that preceded it.”

The whole interview is well worth a read, and it can be found here.

(This is my attempt at live-blogging the ONA panel on the future of news at the CBC in Toronto with Leonard Brody of NowPublic, Rahaf Harfoush — who did research for Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics — and Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur. Note: I did this on a BlackBerry, so please excuse the typos)

Keen says citizen journalism sounds Orwellian, like a guy in a beret creeping around feeling very virtuous; doesn’t think journalists should necessarily be good citizens;

Brody says it’s a dumb term, like citizen dentist; says it is “the people’s view”; brand promiscuity; most younger readers don’t read just one thing, they search and read an average of 16 links on a story;

Rahaf (who is in her 20s) says she bought a newspaper a week ago — for her dad.

Keen says citizen journalism is part of a fetishization of the authentic, focus on the personal; cultural changes, has very little to do with media; take out your frustrations on something else — doctors or restaurants, don’t ruin media; big media has as much responsibility as anyone else; bowing to reality television and cult of celebrity;

Keen says big media should be less humble, more arrogant, more authoritative; saying we understand, you need a voice is … Recipe for disaster;

If you take that view, Brody says, you will be speaking to an empty room. It’s not good or bad, it just is.

Rahaf says having an arrogant journalist tell me what’s important, not interested in that; interested in a dialogue, and in individual voices.

Public view, human perspective and don’t trust single view — want to triangulate truth on my own Brody says; he says the vast majority of people don’t want to be paid; if they did it would be easier — love and ego are much harder to control;

Keen says when we generate something of value most of us want to be paid; not going to give away my labour for nothing; youtube model or wikipedia model, vessel they put their information into, bad in every way; one of the things that keep journalists honest is that they’re paid

Rahaf says that blogs have to develop a reputation, build up trust over time, effectively self-regulating; social contract

Brody says they want to be arbiters of their own truth;

Keen says no wisdom of crowds with Digg and Reddit — he sees new anonymous oligarchy with these sites; idealism of the Web 2.0 crowd, but reality is it’s an echo chamber, people becoming more and more ignorant;

Brody says moved away from the Long Tail to the nano-tail, the hyper-personal, Facebook feeds etc. Keen says that’s not news it’s just gossip;

Availability of different perspectives, Rahaf says, not trying to guide traditional media;

Keen says we can’t learn anything from children (after journalism students give their views of the future of journalism); says they are naieve and should probably get a job in a kitchen or something because they won’t have jobs — no one will pay them for their work.

Brody says he’s not that idealistic about it — it’s really just a technological split between breaking news and the analysis; newspapers like the New York Times are out of the breaking news business, but the need for analysis is still there;

Keen says hyper-local is the future, but Craig Newmark has ruined that business for traditional media, so taken away the ability to monetize local.

Rahaf says it’s about whether you care or don’t care — you could take away the Internet and put someone in a newsstand and if they don’t care about the news they will pick up a Cosmopolitan or whatever; doesn’t have that much to do with the Internet;

Brody says that the real potential of news is when you have GPS and you can see where people are and how close they are to a news event;

Keen says need to educate kids about the difference between a newspaper like the Times or the Guardian and blogs; teach them that some media sources have gatekeepers and are generally more reliable and some are not; media literacy is one of the things we need the most;

Questioner who is a media literacy educator, says she wonders whether kids are getting too used to reading about and paying attention only to others like them; they expect things to be highly tailored, and if it isn’t they’re not interested; what does that mean for them as citizens;

Brody says need to go back to what journalists were originally good at — pulling things together, aggregating and packaging, and presenting it; think that there will be an even greater hunger for that in the future;

Keen says he is actually optimistic about Web 2.0 tools because they can do a lot — if they are in the right hands; he says the new new thing will be expertise, now that people have realized that most of Web 2.0 is garbage.

He does it in a nice way, of course — and, more than that, a thoughtful and erudite way — but David Weinberger’s summary of Andrew “the Internet is killing culture” Keen’s arguments (such as they are) nevertheless dismantles and mulches the prominent pundit’s points perfectly.

To his credit, Weinberger — author of Everything Is Miscellaneous — doesn’t just bash Keen and his idiotic meanderings outright. Instead, he carefully lays out what he believes is the best possible interpretation of Keen’s arguments, and then painstakingly dismantles that. In one of the best parts, he says:

“I think that’s one reason so many of us find Keen’s book frustrating. It’s like reading an argument against democracy that keeps pointing at how many people there are and how much they disagree with one another.

That’s not an argument against democracy. That’s the problem democracy was invented to solve. Likewise, the Web was invented to solve the problem of scale.”

It’s a long post, but worth the read. For some additional points, check out the full text of a “Reply All” debate between Keen and Weinberger that ran in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year. As some of you long-time blog readers may know, I am not exactly a fan of Mr. Keen’s. And it seems that Tom “plasticbag” Coates has some issues with him as well, as he articulates in this recent post.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post about Andrew Keen — author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture — we had a Q & A with the notorious Web 2.0 skeptic at globeandmail.com today, but despite my best efforts we didn’t get nearly as much back-and-forth as I was hoping. The full version is here (and, as is often the case, there’s some good responses in the comments) and James Robertson has some thoughts on the Q & A here.

Rachel Sklar, the lovely and talented Huffington Post blogger (and a star panelist at mesh) asked Keen:

“Who gets to be the arbiter of what is Good For Culture and what is Bad For Culture – some snobby on-high culture dude logrolling his buddy’s crappy book of “art” photos or the public, who votes with their eyeballs and their mouse clicks and their time?”

To which Keen responded:

here has always and will always be an arbiter of taste. Web 2.0′s idealists suggest otherwise — but behind their “democracy” is either an algorithm (easily gamed) or a new elite of generally anonymous tastemakers who are shaping wisdom of the crowd sites like reddit and digg. I like professional arbiters — reviewers, editors, agents, talent scouts.”

And I think Eric Berlin of Online Media Cultist and Blogcritics.org made a good point when he said:

“You’ve described “The Cult of the Amateur” as “not designed to be particularly fair or balanced.” What standard would you hold to the blogs that exist in your “digital forest of mediocrity”?

Is it possible in your view that some small percentage of the many millions of blogs add to the overall culture by some broad definition?”

To which Keen responded:

“Good question. I think that the percentage of good blogs is lower because the system has no filters. At least mainstream media has professional filters which, if not ideal, certainly gets rid of some of the dross and finds some jewels.

Professional filters don’t always work and tend toward somewhat conservative, populist and predictable taste. But I prefer to have my culture served up to me by professional tastemakers than an algorithm or by anonymous people on the Internet acting in the name of the virtuous crowd.”

In the end, that is the question — would you rather restrict yourself to the populist and predictable that gets served up by professional tastemakers, or do you enjoy a little more variety and spice, and are prepared to wade through a little dross to get to it? We have Keen’s answer.

And just between you and me, I have a feeling Mr. Keen is probably a lot less bombastic in his views than he makes out — extreme opinion gets lots of attention, as all good Internet trolls know. Kevin Marks puts Keen firmly in that camp, and so does Doc Searls.