He refers to major media outlets as “trusted news sources”, with no mention of the recent loss of trust that occurred on a large scale as a result of the major news outlets beating the drums of war leading up to the Iraq invasion.

He talks about bloggers and wikipedia editors having an agenda, yet makes no mention that major news outlets have similar pressures from owners and sponsers.

He bemoans the banality of youtube videos, and then follows it up with dire statistics of job losses in major media, including….People magazine.

Last week I attended a symposium sponsered by Pacific Gas and Electric that featured a speech by Richard Heinburg, who mentioned that while he was in town, he was contacted by KGO.
KGO bills itself as the most listened to radio station in Northern California. They wanted him to participate in a program they were producing regarding the spike in oil prices. KGO wanted to frame the debate as a Democratic view (Oil companies are engaging in price gouging) vs. a Republican view (OPEC is holding back on production).
As an expert in his field, Heinburg tried to explain to them that they were off base. The cause for the recent spike is simply supply and demand. Oil is in depletion and prices rise as emeging economies requiring more oil are attempting to acquire it in a marketplace of declining availability.

What Heinburg has to say would shed a light on what is arguably the most serious crisis we as a civilization will face in the coming years, namely the exhaustion of our ability to extract fossil fuels from the earth and use them to produce energy.

After explaining this to KGO several times, Heinburg was told thanks, but no thanks, depriving KGO listeners of an important perspective in the oil price story.

The purity of information is not completely determined by it’s source. This is why Keen’s arguement fails.

I find his attitude demeaning at best and damaging at worst. I am neither a blogger nor a technophobe but to dismiss someones creative output, in whatever medium, as, in some way, unworthy is ridiculous. You can change the channel, listen to another station, not visit an exhibition. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it.

larry lessig and creative commons espouse choice in copyright — from allowing people/companies to assign full copyright on work to a handful of mashups of attribution, non/commercial use options to marking content as fair use in the public domain.

how does providing copyright choice equate with communism? how does revamping the copyright system into something anyone can use and understand explicitly, equate with theft?

personally speaking, i think it’s a brilliant idea to empower people in marking their work as fair use for the public domain or for use, but only with proper attribution. why not allow people to send work out into the wild of the web to propagate and take advantage of those viral mechanisms?

the problem i have with keen is that he sounds like a mixed-up luddite; he uses 2.0 technology to promote himself up into the mainstream while simultaneously trashing that very technology (and the people who are trying hard to make it work, legally).

if he has a problem with bloggers or anyone ripping off copyrighted work, why not set to proposing solutions, similar to how larry lessig “the communist” has?

if i were a betting man, i’d wager that his publisher knocked down his door with a cash money deal after his original article caused so many bloggers to link to his babble.

so his choice was simple: why do the hard work in making a system work to its utmost potential when you can get paid handsomely to trash the folks who are trying to do so. he’s so casual in his rants, he doesn’t even take a well thought out position in the process.

keen is an opportunist to the nth degree.

The pay isn’t a lot, but it does give me an incentive to get the article completed on time and at a decent level of quality. There’s another place that I used to write for that didn’t pay, but I haven’t sent anything to them in three months. As a rule, the more prestigious online and offline publications in my industry pay for content, so that’s who I write for as that’s who I want to be associated with. They also do a better job at editing, promotion, and distribution.

I agree with Andrew Keen to some extent, but I think he hasn’t quite gotten his arms around the issue. Mainstream media is in no danger if copyright laws are enforced. Most people would rather spend their time reading quality. Blogs that consistently deliver quality will morph into mainstream media by necessity and you’ll likely see a few very large online publications being bought by Time Warner or something similar.

However, if copyright is not enforced, and the day comes that your average consumer can watch or read or listen to everything they want and strip the commercials, then big budget media of any kind will just cease to exist and even small scale work will be scaled back because there just won’t be any paychecks for anyone anymore. All that you’ll be left with is state-run media, the McDonald’s Cartoon Channel, and Ask-A-Ninja, and you’ll have more bad choices, but fewer good choices. That’s Andrew’s most important and most accurate point.