Keen's elitism? (revised)

            When Andrew Keen released The Cult of the Amateur in 2007, many believed his theory that the Internet’s democratization of information distribution would damage American culture. Indeed, in the earliest days of the Web 2.0, the idea that the average computer user could competently help spread the news and knowledge may not have been intuitive. Keen latched onto this fear, and lamented that a world had been created that ruined the efficacy of Adam Smith's division of labor by allowing amateurs to have major effects on our sources of information.

            When Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia, however, he took this fear into account. By requiring the user to cite sources and by allowing for the constant reediting of a page by the community, Wales created an Encyclopedia more extensive than any previous one. Then, in 2005, a major study by a respected journal showed that Wikipedia has the same reliability in its content as the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Millions of users, together, created a site of information larger than any known to man. Therefore, many people without the supposed authority to write on such topics, in fact, did so successfully.
            Keen's argument is one of extreme pretention. He assassinates Jimmy Wales's character by noting that he was a graduate school dropout, a gamer, an Ayn Rand reader, and a creator of a peer-to-peer site with links to female celebrities. Keen writes:
       "What Keen had learned as an adolescent playing video games, and relearned from his experience      
       with Bomis [the peer-to-peer website], was the power of the network, the value of what to became
       known as 'distributed technology.'"

            This is not to say that there does not a high rate of mistakes, negligence, and ignorance throughout the Internet. In the case of Wikipedia, however, a system that requires citation of published sources and the constant fact checking by thousands of contributors. Thus, there exists a meritocracy within cyberspace to weed out bad writing.

            The last decade, however, helped reveal that knowledge exists outside the academy and the pressroom. The path to positions of status, such as a doctoral degree or a journalist, is not just one of intelligence and motivation, but also a talent in navigating a system. Partially due to this change in understanding of knowledge, Keen’s book rings with the contemporary reader as one of elitism.