Net-hater Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, warns that Barack Obama’s broadband plan could lead to digital fascism on the U.S.
“Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his ‘personalized’ YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses,” Keen writes in The Daily Beast.
Now, here’s the kicker. I don’t think Keen is entirely wrong, despite his hyperbole.
I’m still waiting for policymakers of understand the need for a well-stocked national digital library system—and more encouragement of book reading in our schools. That’s what TeleRead is about.
E-books can’t single-handedly save us from fascism if the current recession turns into a full-fledged Great Depression, but they can help, by encouraging more sustained thought than videos could.
Related: The Long Decline of Reading in Adrian Hon’s blog (via Mike Cane). Also see an earlier TeleBlog item, E-books, and prep for teachers and librarians, please, Barak—not just broadband: TeleRead, anyone?
(Beast article found via David Farber’s Very Interesting People List.)
In what way are know-nothing neo-fascists memes kept out of circulation without a broadband plan? Just flip on your radio and scan between channels some day. They’re already there and giving them a YouTube channel doesn’t seem worse.
As David points out, broadband gives the potential for more sustained information (as opposed to information-free emotion) exchange.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
Andrew Keen’s understanding of the politics of the 1930s is badly flawed, which makes what else he says, moot. May I recommend, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, by Piers Brendon, available directly at Random House, Sony, Amazon, Mobipocket, and elsewhere in multiple eBook formats.
Unrelated to Keen, I agree about the potential for eBooks to rekindle (pun not intended) an interest in books.
Five words: Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. They’ve done plenty of damage without broadband playing much of a role.
I agree about the importance of encouraging reading, and worry about shrinking attention spans (including my own) but please, this is blatent fearmongering.
I wish everyone would stop writing about Andrew Keen. Time and time again, the man has proven himself to be an idiot, yet somehow he keeps winding up getting media coverage. If everyone would just ignore him he might just go away. None of his ideas or arguments have ever been good enough to waste time debating.
“Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his ‘personalized’ YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses,” Keen writes in The Daily Beast.
Now, here’s the kicker. I don’t think Keen is entirely wrong, despite his hyperbole. ”
That quote is so nonsensical you have to wonder if Keen’s anti-Internet schtick isn’t just that or if he’s borderline mentally ill. He’s crossed over into Ann Coulter outrageousness.
Anyway, the quote makes no sense. The reality is that Father Coughlin had an enormous audience and influence … imagine today if rather than Rush Limbaugh, the #1 personality on talk radio was David Duke. Coughlin — in a pre-Internet era — had far more influence than any individual or group has on the Internet.
Just go to Youtube and compare viewership rates. Loose Change, full version -2.7 million views. Weird Al ‘White and Nerdy’ — 47 million views.
It’s also weird to see Keen so apparently afraid of his pretty much non-defined “digital fascism” and then end with such a fascist-like flourish,
“We live in an increasingly democratized culture in which individuals, tragically, have less and less control over their own economic lives. The Internet—in its seductive promise of personal empowerment—only compounds this illusion.”
Yeah, all that personal empowerment needs to give way to some sort of national zeitgeist and top down hierarchical control rather than the chaos of freedom and control by the money changers.
He can’t even stay on-message in his own damn op-ed!