Recently, a well-known biblicablogger who really despises Wikipedia took notice of a Newsweek article about expert-driven alternatives to Wikipedia. The article quoted Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Currency, 2007), which I recently finished reading (see here for a brief comment on chapter 1). Apparently enthused by Keen’s description of Wikipedia content as “crap,” this biblicablogger declared,

I don’t know who this Andrew Keen is, but I like him! Even biblical studies and theology have been infected by the ‘cult of the amateur’ and we have all paid the price for it- with stuff like Simcha and Cameron’s nonsense as just one example among hundreds.

Most Higgaion readers will know that I too have harshly criticized some of Simcha Jacobovici’s team-ups with James Cameron on biblical topics, so to that extent I certainly occupy common ground with the fellow quoted above.

However, having also actually read Keen’s book (rather than just a “sound bite” in a Newsweek article), I find the above quotation deeply ironic, because Keen also harshly criticizes a number of activities in which bloggers in general—including the blogger quoted above—engage on a regular basis. In The Cult of the Amateur, Keen blasts away at all forms of user-generated content on the Internet. Keen savages bloggers who report news, but don’t have journalism degrees; Internet users who offer movie reviews, but are not employed by established media outlets as movie reviewers; online commentators who publish their political opinions but don’t have political science degrees; anyone who writes on the Internet about sports but doesn’t work for pay as a sports journalist—you get the idea. Yet almost all bloggers, including the one quoted above, offer such comments and opinions on a regular basis. If you want to offer opinions about the news, entertainment media, sports, politics, or anything else but you don’t funnel those opinions through the editorial staff of a newspaper, radio station/network, or television station/network, Keen would call you an “amateur” and would say that you are killing our culture.

Keen particularly emphasizes training and editorial review as important controls on published content. Thus, he lambasts not only Wikipedia contributors, but also folk who post homemade videos on YouTube or disseminate their books through Lulu. The biblicablogger quoted above arguably has a stronger claim than Simcha Jacobovici to expertise in matters related to the use of biblical narrative in historical reconstruction. However, if that gentleman were to film himself offering a point-by-point critique of The Jesus Family Tomb, and were to post that video on YouTube or on his own blog, Keen might very well criticize our biblicablogger rather than Jacobovici! After all, Jacobovici is a professional, properly credentialed filmmaker, he spent millions of dollars on his documentary, and his film passed editorial muster at the Discovery Channel. Until this happens, of course, we can’t know for sure, but such an outcome would be consistent with Keen’s overall approach.

Now I realize that certain aspects of what I have written above might be taken as sniping at a fellow biblicablogger, but here’s the important take-away point: a rush to praise can be as ill-advised as a rush to criticize. Keen thinks almost as ill of bloggers as he does of Wikipedia contributors, so it’s odd to find praise for him on a blog that violates so many of Keen’s “bloggers ought nots”—violations that most bloggers, including biblicabloggers like myself and the gentleman quoted above, commit quite frequently. Biblicabloggers, no matter how much you may hate Wikipedia, Andrew Keen is not in your corner.

Oh, here’s another Keen irony: I listened to the audiobook version of The Cult of the Amateur during several commutes to and from Pepperdine. The audiobook was read aloud by—wait for it—Andrew Keen himself, who, as far as I know, has no other audiobook narration credits to his name, nor any formal training in oratory or the oral interpretation of literature. Since my bachelor’s degree was in human communication, with an emphasis on public speaking, and since I make my living by teaching college students, which involves a lot of public speaking, and even, yes, since I listen to a great many audiobooks, I think I have sufficient expertise to say that Keen’s reading was amateurish and an unpleasant aesthetic experience.