(Sorry in advance if my email mis-formats my response, as is occasionally the case, but here goes:)
In regards to the battle between mediocrity and its right to exist: when Michael Verdi says: "What's crappy or mediocre to one person is pure gold to another. There's room for it all on the internet. And that is the whole fucking point! You don't have to be "good" to be on the Internet and nobody can make you watch the stuff you don't want to watch." ... I'm pretty sure that qualifies as "rallying to the defense of mediocrity" -- not BECAUSE Michael (I'm not singling him out -- he simply made the last, most applicable comment) is a fan of mediocrity, but because he believes in the power of the individual voice, regardless of that voice's relative quality. As I said earlier, the individual voice is, by and large, not very interesting to the great majority. For every interesting POV in the world, there are hundreds or thousands that are merely regurgitating overheard information. Not that that matters to a lot of us, who believe web media is important primarily because it lets us all be heard equally -- even if only by the 10 people who find us interesting. However, when Michael then says: "Some of my favorite videos are the ones I've made of my family or ones that my friends have made. I doesn't matter if they are considered good or worthwhile. What matters is that they're there. THAT is the revolution." ... that essentially makes the case that this revolution is merely a gigantic holding tank for crap that appeals to 10 people each. Call me a cynic, but that doesn't sound like much of a revolution; it sounds like the preamble to one. Meanwhile, profit doesn't matter more than people, as Ron Watson accuses Keen (possibly correctly) of believing. People always matter more than profit -- and, without people, there can't BE profit. But until those of us creating social media are creating media that people actually WANT to see -- and by "people," I mean more than 10 -- there's not much of a revolution to speak of; there's just a bunch of people making mediocre videos and putting them online, believing that their ability to do so somehow constitutes an paradigm shift in and of itself. We can also each build a spacecraft, if we try, but that possibility alone doesn't constitute an aerospace revolution. Please don't confuse the ability to create media with the revolutionary act of creating media that MATTERS. Just because any of us can pick up a camera (or a microphone, or a keyboard) and send our voice out into the internet, that doesn't mean that WHAT we're saying / doing / creating IS revolutionary. Yet. However, when the power of individual POVs (which, yes, DO matter) combines with a worldwide upswing in relative quality -- i.e., when people who have the ability to use this media actually use it to tell compelling stories that transcend expected boundaries and appeal beyond their initial target audience of 10 -- THEN we'll be well on our way to a revolution. And then Andrew Keen will have a much bigger monster to contend with than simply the possibility of one. Onward and upward. Justin Kownacki
