The Threat of "The Noble Amateur"

             In his writing The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen insists on the danger of “the noble amateur” and argues that these amateurs are “killing our culture”.

As an antonym to “the dictatorship of expertise”, the noble amateurs are those who are valued for their contribution and knowledge in a particular field even if they have received no formal training. It is an incarnation of democracy on the Internet.

However, Keen strongly opposes to the establishment of the concept of the noble amateur. He suggests that “a radically democratic culture is hardly conductive to scholarship of to the creation of wisdom”, and we are living “in a highly specialized society”. He proposes the absurdity of so-called democracy in which amateurs’ spontaneous opinions can surpass experts’ logical analyses. Thus, he sees the amateurism would liquidize our culture and wisdom and eventually destroy them.

Keen raised examples such as Wikipedia, citizen journalism and disappearance of books to explain how these elements threaten our culture. The Japanese mobile phone novel, (keitai shosetsu) “Koizora” (Love of Sky), which brought a huge discussion on the internet, is no exception. Written by an ‘amateur’ novelist Mika, Koizora depicts complexly intertwined human relationships and social taboos including rape, unexpected pregnancy, miscarriage and fatal diseases. As the novel became more famous among the young female, some mass media started to pick up its idiosyncrasy. Mika’s amateurism as a novelist brought a lot of controversies, such as her use of language, which was very simple and sometimes perceived as uneducated. Her lack of knowledge about miscarriage and cancer was also subject to disparagement.

Yet, millions of readers were drawn to Koizora, which indicates that it was a cultural movement. More ‘amateur’ novelists, thinking that they can follow the same path as Mika did, would produce tons of works that somewhat resemble Koizora. With more readers, mobile phone novels can be misleading and they can provide wrong image of how a society is like. For instance, recently, mass media put more focus on sexual crimes in Japan, and Koizora also depicts many incidents of raping, as if these can happen in reality. However, according to the survey conducted by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC), the number of incidents for rape is actually dropping in the years of 2003 to 2008. (Refer to: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Crime-statistics/Sexual_violence_sv_against_children_and_rape.xls) In addition, Koizora is described as a fiction that is based on a real life story, which can exacerbate its extent of fabrication.

In conclusion, the noble amateurs can direct the general opinion away from the truth and, as Keen’s apprehension suggests, destroy our wisdom. As the noble amateurs are celebrated, we have to be more cautious about any conventional signals that they send out.