28 July to 4 August

Engaging with the cult of amateurism: the answer is... Google It!

Recently I read Andrew Keen's polemic The Cult of the Amateur. It tells the disturbing story of how 'YouTube', 'Flickr' and other user-generated internet phenomena are destroying codes of professionalism, authority, expertise and ethical conduct. Citizen journalism is a good example of the ethics (or lack of them) that operate in a chaotic media environment where experienced foreign correspondents and Professors of Human Genetics compete on even terms with young Joe Blogger and his roving camcorder.

Of course, university students are among the more prolific users of the so-called 'Web 2.0', including that 'wisdom of the crowd' encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. But now I'm forced to think again. Perhaps this tsunami of amateurism is not really amateurish at all but, rather, a running stream of revolutionary ripples flowing towards the all-too-unfathomable future over which postmodernists oft muse. This is a future without specialists, without professions, without academia, without knowledge hierarchies, without experience, without ethics. But perhaps this is also, without qualification, the democratic, civic, 'wikinomic' good life we are all crying out for. For proof of the pudding, see what happens when you google the words 'miserable failure' - and now all will seem well with Googlism, and the cult of the amateur.

Dr Dan Laughey, Senior Lecturer in Media and Popular Culture