Flintoff "Thinking is so over' (looking at Keen (and mostly agreeing)) and some stuff on MARXISM

“The Internet - Thinking is so over” – Flintoff 23/7/07  and Marxism Notes

-       summarises Keen – but isn’t in total agreement. Talks about the ‘infinite monkeys with typewriters’ argument – eventually they will create a masterpiece – but Keen firmly believes that now the internet has for all intents and purposes created the infinite monkey scenario, he says “Today’s technology hooks all those monkeys up with all those typewriters” and those “millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.” (here quoting Flintoff) – echoing Keen’s argument ‘cult of the amateur’

-       “...the supposed “democratisation” of the web has been a sham. “Despite its lofty idealisation it’s undermining truth, souring civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent,” he says.” (Flintoff)

-       Flintoff points out that Wikipedia was (at the time of writing) the 17^th most trafficked site on the net and that Britannia (Encyclopaedia) was 5128^th. This has resulted in jobs losses at Britannia which he says is a problem because “we’ll be obliged to rely on the unreliable patchwork of information parcelled out on Wikipedia by people who often don’t even reveal their identity”

-       Do you agree with what Keen says – bearing in mind this is 2008 – he genuinely believed that Web 2.0 was already well on its way to killing the music industry and that is would not be long before the TV and Film studios would also face their own demise...so we’re here now 5 years later – Has web 2.0 killed the music industry? The film industry? Really they’ve just had to adapt (and you will be showing how in your exam answers, by and large)

MARXISM - very simplified

-       Flintoff and Keen belong to a group of academics/media professionals who fought hard to retain the elitism of their status and professionalism – they see the ‘democratisation’ offered by the web 2.0 developments as a serious threat to the status quo and in this sense this is where arguments stemming from Marxist models come in – Marx (and I’m over simplifying here) talked about how the elite controlled the ‘means of production’ and thus was able to control 'hearts and minds'. Althusser outlined how there are ideological state apparatuses such as schools, political parties, family, culture etc that the establishment (elite) uses to maintain control; this is done through repeated ideological messages embedded in texts (and in the case of schools taught as the way to think, behave etc) which become naturalised – we (allegedly) don’t even realise how we are encapsulated into the system (Foucault calls this being ‘intepellated[1]’ into our ‘place’ in the system). The idea of how we are conditioned to believe in a ‘universal truth’ is hard to see until you escape your culture as anyone who has been to the Orient, Russia or other ‘far flung' shores can attest; only when you find yourself wondering why the Russian Air Hostess is so 'rude' do you begin to realise it’s a cultural thing – they are being their version of polite, such as it is. This is where you can see the edges of your naturalised ideological conditioning: who says what is right/rude etc??...scary stuff peeps - we are conditioned into thinking ideas, behaviours and other such things are 'normal' and 'correct' - what hs been called 'universal truth' - when really they are only just the way 'we' do it/think - so not universal at all!

-       There’s a lot more to this argument but for your exam, all you need to worry about is that it is easy to argue that the established, ‘old’ media felt threatened by the developments of Web 2.0 because they no longer would have complete control over what people read/consumed and when; Keen's problem is that really those pesky monkeys were thinking for themselves!

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[1] Intepellated – to literally be ‘called’ into your place