THEPENSIONER.(Letters)

Byline: Elaine Morgan

I'VE been reading a book about the internet entitled The Cult of the Amateur, published in 2007 by Andrew Keen. He knew what he was talking about: he'd been in the thick of it from the beginning, in Silicon Valley, pioneering his own start-ups in the first internet gold rush, seeing it as an exciting advance in people power.

Steve Dub in Carmarthen His book rang alarm bells about a wide range of issues. He told tales of people whose lives had been blighted by hackers tapping into their credit card numbers, and others whose confessions and/or photographs, intended to be private, had been splashed all over the network. He wrote of university teachers trying to distinguish original student essays from chunks of downloaded material. He deplored the sky-rocketing amounts of internet pornography, and online gambling. He said the net was destroying thousands of jobs, playing hell with the music industry, threatening the continued existence of newspapers and libraries.

He was particularly concerned about the dissemination of knowledge (or what passes for knowledge). Unlike Encyclopedia Britannica, the net's online equivalent Wikipedia allowed anyone at all to add and edit entries on its website, replacing the old "dictatorship of expertise" with a "dictatorship of idiots". That may sound like an irritable egg-head trying to stop outsiders horning in on his own speciality. But one of Wikipedia's co-founders, Larry Sanger, described Keen's book as "thought-provoking and sobering".

I too was once intoxicated by the idea of challenging the "dictatorship of expertise". I was trying to promote Alister Hardy's ideas on human origins, which professional scientists treated as undeserving even the briefest response. Online, I got feedback. It consisted at first of a torrent of ridicule and abuse, but it did enable me to gauge what was happening, and whether students were being given solid reasons for rejecting Hardy's idea. I think Keen's worries on this score might be eased when Britannica is accessible on-line as a source of knowledge based on agreed facts and stated sources, leaving Wiki as a place to shoot your mouth off anonymously about what somebody once told your auntie.

More worrying is what's happening in the "blogosphere". People - especially young people - are deeply influenced by what other people are thinking, saying, and doing. Anyone trying to gauge the opinions of any age-group from the internet is being taken for a ride. Keen reported that already in 2007 more than half the active "blogs" on-line were actually "splogs" (spam/blogs) paid for, or generated by, organisations such as commercial corporations or political pressure-groups.

I wish he'd write another book giving his views on Wikileaks.