Wednesday, June 03, 2015
Interesting short blog post attacks permissive attitude toward "amateur" criticism online
I got a tweet today pointing to a blog posting by Seth
Goldin, very brief (here), saying “the critic is an amateur hack” and that
we’ve made it easy for “unpaid, untrained, amateur critics” to be heard. Call “them” the “Pharisees” (although the
latter were an established, paid priesthood, usually). Goldin’s blog is quite interesting, and a lot
of it seems to apply to how to sell your ideas in the workplace, something for
another day. It’s interesting that the
tweet, with a quick paraphrase, came from Jack Andraka (Books blog, March
18).
Of course, this post relates to “user generated
content”, indirectly protected by Section 230 (and DMCA Safe Harbor). We’re used to contemplating that idea with
respect to major social media platforms today, where “whitelisting” or a list
of likely recipients is a major concept, but in earlier days (starting in the
late 1990s) it was more about self-broadcast to anyone who could find it in a
search engine. And, like it or not, that
was an effective way to get political arguments in front of people’s eyes. And, yes, often it was “unpaid”. (Here I go again, Reid Ewing’s 2011
mockumentary short film “It’s Free”, which needs to come back.) Often it was amateurish. Call it grass-roots. it is more than just criticism, but it is personal history that hosts nuanced criticism of established adversarial policy positions.
On the flip side, of course, there has always been the
world of K Street, in Washington DC, paid lobbyists (“professionals”), whose
careers and mortgage payments are based on pitching one-sided positions for
specific clients. (Probably they do some
entertaining these days at Nationals Park, since the baseball team has become
formidable.) To be very frank, it’s
easier to “commercialize” (even in books and other media) one-sided positions
on almost any issue, including (now), gay marriage (and, a decade ago, gays in
the military). “Unpaid” speakers are
more likely to be able to look at both sides of the issue and point out logical
flaws in thinking. In fact, I recall, back in August 2001 (a month before tragedy) a corporate sales meeting where a "paid" expert speaker predicted a 35,000 Dow!
Even so, in recent months there has been a lot more
talk about making speech – whether in blogs or self-published books – pay its
own way. Implicit are trademark and
security concerns, as well as equality, in the way speakers actually have
accountability to others before they speak.
In the meantime, our economy – and our dependence on
underpaid labor – forces a lot of people into hucksterism and “taking sides”. So does the top-down nature of most advocacy organizations.
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