Posted 5:07 PM by Gene

Someone named Andrew Keen has written a book, and he sighs:

“It’s creating an increasingly inane and trivialized culture....One imaginary dystopia is that in 25 or 50 years, there will be no mainstream media. There’s nothing inevitable about Hollywood. There’s nothing inevitable about the music industry. The replacement for mainstream media is Twitter, it’s YouTube, it’s Wikipedia … If you read it on the Internet, it likely isn’t true.”

Valid enough, yet we must confess the culture couldn't have devalued itself without the past fifty years of decline, and if the Web churns out tons of "increasingly inane and trivialized culture" it's only a broader reflection of the top-down culture around it. The sci-fi phreaks, the horror-porn ghouls, the rock and TV-series worshippers, the schlock-cult obsessive compulsives and anal retentives -- none of these would have been if the boys way up there hadn't churned out the stuff for years -- and a gotten a public increasingly distant from standards and taste to like it.

(Via IWantMedia)