Stop the Monkeys!

[Walter Burek]

A recurring rant on my Inklings blog is my huffing about the "dumbing down of America" -- a downward spiral in our culture caused by an educational system that graduates students who can't solve simple math problems, can't write a decent sentence and who can't comprehend what they read unless it's written in 4th-grade English. This may sound like nothing more than intellectual snobbery, but the truth is that the corrosive effects of this “dumbing down” now permeate our everyday life and work. Poor grammar and misspelling in newspapers, magazines and on television. “Song” lyrics that range from vulgar to pornographic. Books, magazines, movies and television shows that celebrate the lowest common denominators of our society. And most tragically, America’s declining role as world leader in science, technology and literature.

Now comes a broadside against the culturally and economically damaging effects of the Internet on our lives. “The monkeys are taking over the show,” says Andrew Keen in his new book, The Cult of the Amateur. His simian allusion is to 19th century biologist T. H. Huxley’s “infinite monkey theorem.” Huxley theorized that if infinite monkeys were equipped with infinite typewriters, eventually some of them would write masterpieces comparable to those of Shakespeare, Plato and Adam Smith.

Keen writes: “Except in our Web 2.0 world, the typewriters aren’t quite typewriters, but rather networked personal computers, and the monkeys aren’t quite monkeys, but rather Internet users. And instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys – many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins – are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.”

The core of all this monkey business, avers Keen, is the blog. And he estimates that by 2010 there will be 500 million blogs (up from 53 million last year) “spewing an endless stream of amateur journalism, uninformed commentary, and wretched poetry, fiction, reviews and essays … infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.”

Keen sees this flood of bad communications as a cataclysm that will drive out high-quality credible communications. With everyone doing his or her own thing and stealing the work of others, he claims, hardly anyone will be able to make any money from creative writing, advertising, journalism, composing music or making movies.

He believes The Cult of the Amateur should be taken as a clarion call for everyone who is in any way associated with the Web to help seek out solutions that will stop the monkey business and allow those of us with talent to prosper and our culture to flourish.

One million monkeys on one million keyboards tapped out this page for Walter Burek in exactly 0.208 seconds.

Only kidding!

There is a view that disagrees the monkeys will take over the Internet and I’ll write about that next in The Writer Rides Again.

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