Should he stay or should he go?

There is a fair amount of debate going at Jeff Jarvis's Buzz machine at the moment.

It concerns whether Jeff should accept an invitation to debate with Andrew Keen,the author of the book "Cult of the Amateur.How today's Internet is killing our culture and assualting our economy"


The book which is out in June but has been heavily previewed challenges a lot of the assumptions that we have about the web.In particular,he claims that it is destroying our culture,ruining our livelyhoods and is making us slaves to the digital age.

The idea that as citizen journalists we can take control of the media through the digital medium is also decried.Equally he is very critical of social networking sites

'MySpace does not generate a healthy culture. People of like minds congregate to confirm what they want and I don't see that generating new talent or a far-reaching community. MySpace is not a community we should be proud of.'


Jeff points out that

Keen is not just an elitist, he is authoritarian to the point of Stalinism. At the end: “Can we really trust society to behave properly in the Wild West culture of the Web 2.0 revolution? I would argue that we are easily seduced, corrupted, and led astray. In other words, we need rules and regulations to help control our behavior online, just as we need traffic laws to regulate how we drive in order to protect everyone from accidents.” Of course, we already have those laws and they govern life online. That’s a red herring. It’s the gatekeepers he wants, the experts anointed by institutions not by us ignorant masses, the authorities.

And the consensus at the moment is that Jeff should attend the debate(56 comments to date)