I just finished Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur, a book that Lawrence Lessig claims is a great work of "self parody":

"what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won't know what's true and what's false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity -- from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics."

Lessig's blog entry goes on to pick apart the book - I'm glad someone did.

Personally, I found myself actually YELLING at the book. There are any number of irresponsible arguments in this book, and listing them would take forever. Here's one example as Keen explains the problem with blogs:

"Blogs on both the left and the right have perfected the art of political extremism. Unlike professionally edited newspapers and magazines where the political slant of the paper is restricted to the op-ed page" (53).

I myself have argued that blogs do little more than carve out enclaves of agreement, but does anyone actually think that the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal confine their "political slant...to the op-ed page"? Ask Rush Limbaugh or any number of other "liberal media" conspiracy theorists what they think about "expert editors" and their ability to weed out ideology and bias.

But that's just one example...there are so many more. In a later post, I'll take on Keen's notion that netizens are "monkeys" that are incapable of finding ways to filter information.

For now, I'll confine myself to an argument that most intersects with my own project. That argument is one about ethics. Here is now Keen talks about YouTube:

"On a Web site with no filters, no ethical codes, no accountability or disciplinary consequences, one has no way of knowing how many of these films were doctored" (emphasis added, 82).

And then a couple of pages later, when Keen compares the Web to Borges' "The Total Library" (a text that Keen describes as predicting "the horrors of the infinite library, one that has no center, no logic"):

"Borges' 'The Total Library' is today's Internet - anonymous, incorrect, chaotic, and overpowering. it is a place where there is no concrete reality, no right and wrong, no governing moral code." (emphasis added, 84)

The argument that the web has "no ethical codes" is used by both the utopians and the dystopians. That is, they both begin from the assumption that the Web is a space where anything goes and this "anything goes" atmosphere means there are no codes, no rules, no constitutions. Here is where Lessig's work is useful. For Lessig, the aim should not be an Internet without rules. Instead, scholars and citizens should pay close attention the rules, the

"'constitution,' the code that lies beneath:
We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that we believe are fundamental. Or we can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to allow those values to disappear. There is no middle ground. There is no choice that does not include some kind of building." (Code Version 2.0,6)

Lessig allows us a way to talk about the codes and constitutions that underlie the Web. For Keen, there is "no ethical code" on the Web, and I suspect this is because the ethical code of the Web is not HIS ethical code. However, the utopian crowd (people like Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, another book I read this week - and a book that Keen has particular distaste for) makes the same argument. They argue that anything goes on the Web and that this is a good thing.

Lessig's view seems to be most useful and most realistic. There is no space without a code/constitution. I would take this one step further to argue that the Web's ethical code is based on hospitality. That hospitality is along the lines of what Derrida describes in a number of places:

"Hospitality is culture itself and not simply one ethic amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling inasmuch as it is a manner of being there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to others, to others as our own as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality. But for this very reason, and because being at home with oneself (l’être-soi chez soi—l’ipséité même—the other within oneself) supposes a reception or inclusion of the other which one seeks to appropriate, control and master according to different modalities of violence, there is a history of hospitality, an always possible perversion of the law of hospitality (which can appear unconditional), and of the laws which come to limit and condition it in its inscription as a law." (Of Hospitality, 16-17)

This hospitality should not be confused with niceness. In fact, this hospitality isn't always a good thing. Derrida notes that hospitality can often result in a hostage situation. However, if the constitution of the Web is one of hospitality - one which welcomes many voices with fewer filters - it becomes our task to reframe discussions about literacy, intellectual property, identity, and community. Rather than arguing that the Web has "no ethics," we might choose to recognize the ethics of hospitality built in to the Web and then begin our discussion from there. That discussion would have to involve rhetoric, since a broad range of arguments (a lot of noise) is allowed into the conversation. Keen's answer to this noise is "turn back the clock" move - one which asks us to trust traditional institutions (newspapers, magazines, book publishers). My suggestion would be to enable citizens to filter information - and this ability to filter can be enabled through a rhetorical education.

But my discussion of a rhetorical education acknowledges the difficulties of a hospitable web and hospitable texts. It doesn't claim that the Web is inherently democratic (far from it). Instead, I would claim that we are all response-able for figuring out how to deal with the situation of hospitality.