I frequently cite Chris Anderson's Long Tail as I see lots of examples of it in the digital age; my most recent citation can be found immediately below this post. But Andrew Keen points out in a biting post that a recent Wired piece by Anderson buys into the same dialectic reasoning found in The Communist Manifesto. Ouch.

I believe that when Marx is introduced into a debate, people stop listening, even when there's relevance to the citation (although, to be fair, Anderson first cites Marx in his piece, preemptively). So I'll leave Keen's critique aside for a moment. That said, I share Keen's skepticism about Anderson's praise for the amateur culture. Yes, we're seeing more of it than ever before thanks to the ease of the Internet and software, but was anyone saying that culture was forever changed when "America's Funniest Home Videos" hit the airwaves? The content is little different in most respects, as I pointed out the other day.

Anderson, at the end of his piece, tries to separate himself from what he calls "'60s style Utopianism," and from what I know of Anderson, I'd agree that label would be unfair. But the very fact the article was written -- the very fact that he creates a name for this new world, the "Age of Peer Production" -- does suggest that he's been sniffing the YouTube glue a bit more than the label recommends.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 10:35 AM | Free Culture Movement

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