August 2007 – Are amateurs wrecking the work of professionals?

I’m breaking one of my personal rules of work next week by taking my laptop computer on holiday. For years I have campaigned for “real holidays,” enjoyed outside the reach of any office and shared solely within the family.

But that was before I started blogging. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the daily blog has taken over my life but the day doesn’t seem complete somehow without recording those thoughts that would otherwise never go beyond a conversation in the pub.

Besides, there’s not much difference between writing a blog and sending a postcard, only now I will do both.

The blog is symptomatic of changing work patterns. It is one of those pursuits that straddles work and play where the amateur and the professional swim in the same pond.

Some have criticised these developments. Andrew Keen, a first generation web entrepreneur whose business folded in the dotcom collapse at the start of the decade, complains in a new book, The Cult of the Amateur, that bloggers are undermining the intellectual elite who have thrived hitherto within academia and in the established media.

He points to flaws in what he calls the aggregate wisdom of the masses contributing to online communities such as Wikipedia. Without an editor or singular voices, he argues, “the intellectual quality of what the crowd produces is very low.”

I can’t buy this argument. While I agree that what has come to be known as “user-generated content” is vulnerable to abuse and sabotage where people will deliberately feed misinformation or pejoratives in to an online text, each correction or change is made by an individual. An abuse or mistake is temporary; it can be amended just as it would be in new editions of books. If you know the truth and care about the truth then truth will prevail. In that sense, life is work in progress.

Another of the author’s arguments is that truth is distorted by opinion and the fog of different perspectives. But hasn’t that always been the case? To what extent can we regard the Bayeux tapestry as a historical record or, for that matter, the Gospels?

It’s understandable how seasoned professionals who spent years learning their craft, undertaking courses, gaining qualifications, taking advice from experienced hands, might feel aggrieved that their territory has been invaded by amateurs.

But we all start as amateurs, don’t we? Isn’t that the hallmark of the pioneer? What were the Wright Brothers but amateurs?

There are parallels to be drawn between the surge in mass participation within internet communities and the thirst for invention during the industrial revolution and the start of the machine age.

Henry Ford didn’t discover his passion for machinery in an engineering business but on a farm. “It was life on the farm that drove me in to devising ways and means to find better transportation,” he wrote in his autobiography. As a child, he explained, “my toys were all tools.” As an adult, he admitted, nothing had changed. The line between work and play was blurred for Ford too, as it is with all amateurs.

He enjoyed trying to mend watches from the nuts, washers and bits of machinery he carried in his pockets. At the age of 13 he succeeded in getting a repaired watch to keep time. “There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made,” said Ford.

Ford’s father who wanted his son to be a farmer had the good sense to allow him to follow a machine shop apprenticeship. Ford became an accomplished watch-maker but something was missing. Watches, he decided, were not universal necessities, not like transport.

Just as the young Ford dabbled in mechanics, today many young people, and some who are not so young, are dabbling on the internet because they understand, instinctively, that it is transforming the way we communicate and learn.

In a deliberately provocative gesture Mr Keen suggests that bloggers do not read books. This misses the point once again, even if it were true. It’s not books that matter so much as words. It is language that matters. Books and newspapers are established media with their own well-defined protocols and conventions.

The new media is setting its own protocols, many of which are alien and disturbing to those who have been reared on the customs and practices that evolved in an ordered society.

One of the hardest lessons for many of us accustomed to the traditional business community is that there are services available on the web that cost nothing. Whether in New York or Kuala Lumpur, without paying a cent, I can sit in a hotel lobby, using the Skype service on unsecured wireless broadband, speaking in to headphones face-to-face, with the addition of a camera-to-screen link, on a call that has the clarity of the very best digital radio.

Only 10 years ago telephone companies believed this service would be their future. But I’m nowhere near a telephone. I have better sound quality than I ever achieved through a telephone link and I have the kind of visual link-up which once could only be achieved through a satellite connection.

There are people in business who think that such emancipation in communications is wrong, that every service should carry a price for every recipient. But Skype earns revenues through a second-tier charging structure for those who want to access the telephone network beyond their Skype network.

It remains to be seen whether such services will disappear as the long tentacles of commercialism creep in to every cavity created by open-sourcing. I hope not because open-sourced networks have become a platform of creativity for the amateur.

Amateurs and professionals should not divide themselves in to opposing camps. A popular quotation in some internet communities that “amateurs built the Ark, professionals built the Titanic,” is too engaging to ignore. The observation makes a compelling case for the amateur code, but we should never forget that today’s amateur is tomorrow’s professional.

*The Cult of the Amateur, How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, by Andrew Keen, is published by Nicholas Brealey, price £12.99.

See also: Recruitment and Social networks