Richard Bennett

Jeff Jarvis wants your advice. He’s been asked to debate Andrew Keen and he doesn’t know what to do:

Andrew Keen and his publisher have asked me to debate him about his book, The Cult of the Amateur, in New York in June. I’m asking your advice because I’m torn.

The problem is that Keen’s book is the worst of link bait. It’s link whoring. Or should I say talk-show prostitution? It’s frilly lace tempting those who want so much to dismiss this change. He tries to push every internet button he can. Like others, Keen wants to be the contrarian’s contrarian. But that only makes him a double negative. It makes him a curmudgeon, a conservative trying to hold onto the past, a mastadon growling against the warm wind of change. Now I’d be fine having an debate about what the change means and what’s good and bad about it, but Keen makes it all bad with sloppy generalities and blanket insults — like the very worst blog. It’s simply not a good book or a compelling argument.

Do we give this attention? Do we play wack-a-mole with these tiresome arguments? Or do we just ignore it with the sure knowledge that it will go away in an act of self-extinction?

It’s obvious to me that he should, so I told him this:

Of course you should debate Keen.

After a turn at balanced assessment of the influence of amateur writing on the Internet circa 2002-4, you’ve recently gone whole-hog in the cheerleading camp for all things amateur. You wrote one of the best analyses of the toxic effect that bloggers had on the Howard Dean campaign, one in which you acknowledged the echo-chamber effect that cut Dean off from the mainstream and any hope of winning the nomination. Somehow you managed to satisfy yourself that the problems you saw in 2004 have gone away, or never mattered much to begin with.

So your angle should be “I once thought the way Keen does, but now I don’t, and here’s why.” If you arrived at your current position through a process of reflection, it should be very easy to wipe the floor with Keen and expose him as the real amateur. That will kill his book sales and establish the legitimacy of your new vision.

The fact that Keen is your opponent and not any of a half-dozen other people who’ve written about the negative trajectory of the Internet shouldn’t bother you, as any old prop will do.

You once said that Kool-Aid drinking conferences such as O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies would do well to invite critics and curmudgeons. You can make them part of the debate by engaging Keen.

Don’t wimp out, stand up for what you believe.

Back in the Golden Age of Blogging, 2002, I was very enthusiastic about the potential of blogging and the Internet generally to improve the quality of civic discourse and such, because I believed it was a way to bring experts into discussions that had heretofore been handled by the iterate generalists who practice journalism. Instead of dealing with complex issues in terms of vague analogies, expert bloggers would be able to explain deep technical issues in ways that intelligent people could grasp them. This hasn’t panned out for two reasons:

1) Experts often lack perspective on the issues surrounding the areas of the expertise. When the phony Dan Rather memos emerged, typography experts quickly exposed them as fakes, which they were, but that ended the story on favors that Bush received in his National Guard service. So the big story was sacrificed to the small story.

2) The most influential bloggers aren’t experts in any particular subject matter, they’re simply skilled at self-promotion and pandering: the Daily Kos and MyDD, for example, hyped the bogus “net neutrality” issue to drive up their traffic and increase their influence with the public. It’s a nonsense issue, as the regulations that side propose are the only real harm the Internet faces in the immediate future.

So not only has “citizen journalism” and its relative “peer production” failed to bring informed opinion out of the woodwork, they’ve damage the quality of civic debate. Those who continue to bang that drum uncritically have a lot of ‘splaining to do, and shirking debate isn’t the way to go about their business.

There’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth lately about words. Kathy Sierra claimed to be too scared to leave her home in the woods because of threatening words left by anonymous cowards in her blog’s comment section, and the result was general uproar, trips to CNN, and speech codes. Don Imus described a women’s basketball team in unflattering language, and the nation’s race pimps demanded – and got – and end to his employment.

Perhaps that reaction was justified. Maybe it’s reasonable to fear violence at the hands of people who are too cowardly to use their real names in blog comments. It doesn’t seem that way to me, but perhaps I’m just insensitive. And perhaps there’s a magnetic force that freezes radios to the Don Imus show such that they can’t be tuned to any other station when he says stupid things. Or perhaps the radio listening public is too weak, too stupid, and too infantile to tune him out. Legitimate civil rights advocates such as Connie Rice (cousin of Condi, not a typo) who defended Imus are full of it and words of that sort can’t be tolerated and I’m just too insensitive again.

But there’s something about that reaction that doesn’t add up to me. Sometime after the Sierra hubbub broke out and the firing of sad old Imus, the Attorney General of North Carolina held a press conference where he said he was dropping all criminal charges against the three Duke athletes accused of rape by Crystal Gail Mangum. He offered a new law to prevent such miscarriages of justice in the future, and he blasted the DA who brought the case and suppressed evidence, Mike Nifong. He made the extraordinary assertion that the Duke Three are innocent, not just “not guilty.” They were framed, slandered, and abused for no good reason. And it all started with bad words: lies.

And none of the people who sympathized with Kathy Sierra or accused Don Imus of “violating the black community” had a word to say about it.

What the hell is up with that?

The words of Mike Nifong and Crystal Gale Mangum had real consequences. The Duke Three were suspended from school and smeared in newspapers and TV and radio shows all over the country. Their reputations have been permanently altered, and I don’t expect they’re ever going to be as optimistic about justice and fairness in America as they were before those words were spoken again.

The words spoken against Kathy Sierra and the Rutgers basketball girls, on the other hand, were hollow bullshit and everybody knew that and reacted accordingly from the beginning. They weren’t harmed in any meaningful way, certainly not on the same level as the Duke lacrosse boys.

Jesse Jackson falsely accused the Duke boys:

The Duke scandal should lead colleges across the country to hold searching discussions about racial and sexual stereotypes, exposing the myths that entrap so many. But it shouldn’t take the brutalizing of a mother of two to raise these issues. Justice must be pursued at Duke. But Duke should not be treated as an isolated extreme – but as a goad to probing discussion and concerted action to lift students above the hatreds, the fears and the fantasies that still plague our society.

And also gloated over his pound of Imus flesh:

CBS refused to lower its standards anymore to house Don Imus. It is a victory for public decency. No one should use the public airwaves to transmit racial or sexual degradation.

Now I see it: instead of using the airwaves for racial or sexual degradation, we should return them to their rightful mission: slandering innocent white boys. Now it’s all clear.

Perhaps the severity of the reaction to Imus’ admittedly idiotic comment was driven by the needs of Jackson, Sharpton, and the feminist left to avoid any discussion of the conclusion to the Duke case, which doesn’t exactly make them look like heroes.

So why is the media letting them get away with it?

The answer to that has to include the obvious fact that the media was by and large complicit in the symbolic lynching of the Duke Three. The discussion went straight from allegations of rape to national soul-searching about the brutality of sexism and racism without every stopping to consider whether the boys were actually guilty. As it generally goes in rape cases, the defendants were guilty until proved otherwise. Rarely are defendants acquitted of rape because it’s treated in such a special way by the justice system, but this case was so egregious it didn’t even have to go to trial, just to a semi-honest prosecutor.

So the mere fact of the charges being dropped should be enough to make news. Maybe not as great as the feeding frenzy that accompanied the false allegations, but something. (UPDATE: See Terry Moran of ABC News spin his irresponsible journalism.)

And what will the consequences be to the accuser, Crystal Gale Mangum? Nifong faces disbarment, which would be appropriate, but I don’t see any hint that Mangum will be charged for making a false report, libel, defamation, or anything else. She’s going to keep on taking her clothes off for money, turning a few tricks on the side, and running her con games as if nothing had ever happened.

And that’s not right. If words have consequences, if they’re so scary they keep consultants away from conferences, radio hosts off the air, and cause attorneys to lose their licenses, they should have consequences for rape liars as well.

This is America, and fair is fair.

I’ve decided to be nice.

This is because the blogosphere is full of bang-up, hardcore, high-integrity people who read carefully, consider all sides of an argument before posting, and always check their facts. It would be a dishonor to this wonderful crew if I was to go on complaining and arguing all the time. As I want nothing more than universal brotherhood and understanding, I have to set a good example for the others by behaving in an exemplary fashion.

It’s the right thing to do, of course.