Alison Sinclair

Having read various reviews and responses to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, I had already formed the impression that I would agree with the justice of the case, but irked at his failure to be true to his own argument.

And I did, and I was. I was in sympathy with his regret for the passing of standards in writing and reporting, and for the threat to established institutions. I have a traditional education, which inclines me to value standards in reasoning and expression, and to respect expertise. I’m also trying to succeed in as a writer according to the traditional publishing model. In short, I’ve got an investment in the traditional way of doing things.

However, Keen has written a polemic, a very Web approach, exemplifying some of the practices he pillories. He employs cheap insults. He piles anecdote upon anecdote in journalistic style without – this is a scientist beef – any sense of denominator, whether this is a rare instance, or a common practice. He does not explore what other forces might have contributed to, or might actually have been causing, the decline of traditional media and authorities. Misattribution of cause is no help.

In his paen to the objectivity and quality of mainstream media, he does not acknowledge the extent to which the newsworthy is the adworthy, with editors pressured to suppress or modify stories that will threaten the advertising revenue. He does not address the issue of bias, commercial and otherwise, in the mainstream media. He does not assess his benchmark, the quality of reporting. If the misrepresentations of subjects that I know enough to review primary sources on – scientific and medical literature – is anything to go by, then the mainstream media often fail to do their topic justice.

And this isn’t the first time that Culture has been deemed under threat from the Great Unwashed. In the mid nineteenth century, it was from the “mob of scribbling women” who had the temerity not only to write, but to have their ill-educated, uninformed, crass, and embarrassing effusions widely read. As a spiritual descendent of those scribbling women, I know that “standards” are remarkably malleable when used to dismiss the works of the non-PLU (“people like us”). Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing ennumerates the ways.

I also started wondering about which way the whodunnit went. And I propose the contrarian view: The internet began with the amateurs. The culture of cheap consumerism (on the WWW) is what’s killing it.

Mainstream media has been subsidized by advertising revenue, or by government. We’ve no sense of the true costs of high quality production, whether of journalism, broadcast arts, or published information. As consumers we’ve grown accustomed to cheap mass information and cheap mass entertainment. It’s not such a big step from demanding cheap to demanding free. The media are also responsible for the culture of celebrity which feeds into the culture of self-exhibition which Keen also deplores.

Keen does not question what seems to me to the flawed business model of mainstream media, nor consider that the real constituency of mainstream media is the advertisers, not the readers/viewers; when the advertisers go elsewhere, as onto the WWW, and the readership remains, it’s irrelevant. The WWW exposed the vulnerability in this business model. It did not create it.

A great many of the practices he criticizes are an expression not so much of the Internet, but to the application of commercial and criminal practices established well before the Internet,  much less the WWW. The selling of mailing lists. Prevalent, insulting and intrusive advertising. “Customer testimonials” that are bought and paid for by the manufacturer of the product. Con-men and women and fraud artists plying their trade. (Why don’t we abandon the fashionable neoligisms like ‘phishing’ and ‘social engineering’ and call them by the old-fashioned terms. More people might just understand enough to heed the warnings).

I’m not done with this topic, but I’m going to park it for now, and go paddling!

When I first encountered Tiddlyspot, the hosted version of Tiddlywiki (Wikipedia entry), the brilliant, javascripted-to-the-max, server-independent wiki written by Jeremy Rushton, I confess to not immediately seeing the need. I had about a dozen tiddlywikis applied to various writing and organizational projects, a number of which of which lived on a 1 G fire engine red Transcend JF110 alongside their own copies of Portable Firefox for both OSX and Windows. What I ran up against, though, was a concern about security, if I moved outside a restricted set of trusted computers (especially to university library systems). A USB stick seemed to me too good a vector (think phage), and since I haven’t done the poking-under-the-hood on Windows machines that I have on Macs, I wasn’t confident that I had the expertise to ensure I didn’t transmit anything unwanted on the Windows side. But I liked my portable wikis.

Hence the beauty of Tiddlyspot. It’s accessible from any computer-with-internet (and reasonably modern browser), without incurring the security risk of transferring a USB stick. The sign up is simplicity itself: username (which becomes the subdomain name) and password gets you a wiki. You have the option of a public or a private Tiddlywiki, via the control panel tucked behind it, password accessible. A handful of different flavours are available on sign-up, and once you understand Tiddlywiki styling, you can apply that understanding to Tiddlyspot to customize the look – with the caveat that you have to keep the content in the sidebar that allows you to upload and download. The standard set of Tiddlywiki plugins can be used to create tag clouds, most recent updates, splash pages, etc. Backup is a one click download of the whole file to your local hard drive – no XML or archives. You can take it off-line by downloading a local copy, working on it, and then uploading it later. Saving changes and uploading is password protected. I’ve had to email tech support once, and got a prompt and helpful response from Daniel Baird, author of the infernal Minesweeper plugin for Tiddlywiki. (Infernal as in addictive).

Limitations and unknowns: Tiddlyspot Tiddlywikis don’t seem to be terribly visible to Google (I tried an inurl:Tiddlyspot search, which missed most TS-TWs). Maybe this is because TWs tend to be internally linked rather than externally, but maybe Google doesn’t digest Javascript well; I want to look into this. I don’t know how big a TW can get before it breaks (though I haven’t broken one yet). A new dialect (well, different from Dokuwiki and Backpack) of markup has to be grasped. Plugins can slow down the loading (aww, but they are such fun!) There doesn’t seem to be a way to dump all content to a single flat file, though there’s a plugin that will create multiple hyperlinked static HTML files. TW in general is not meant for multiple users. When I started the Okal Rel Universe Concordance, with the intention of it being a multiuser wiki, I had to think through a protocol to prevent co-authors from clobbering each others’ edits. Only the last user is recorded as editor: there’s no edit history. I don’t know whether its security has yet been challenged by the scriptkiddies and wikispammers [1] (this is a downside??) – but note the ease of backup and reconstitution. ([1] Insert here obligatory plaint from senior netizen that this is not the web of yore).

The TS-TWs I have going so far are: the aforementioned ORU Concordance, the Women Scientists in Fiction page previously mentioned (still in early stages), a collection (still in its early stages) of Worldbuilding resources, and a couple that are currently private. On the USB stick, and possibly to move on line, I have repositories of medical and scientific scraps of information, a concordance around a series of linked novellas I am working on, and a scratchpad for another writing project. Other people have been far more inventive – see the Tiddler titled ‘Examples’ on www.tiddlywiki.com.

Additional links:

• Portable apps for Windows, for Portable Fireflox and a surprising number of others
• Portable apps for OSX
• My Tiddlywiki resources page on Backpack – since Google doesn’t seem to be great at indexing TWs, and most of the information and instructions for TWs are contained in TWs, I’ve realized I need to make an immediate note of where I find something – or I might never find it again. A while back I tore my hair out trying to find the plugin that would load the latest 5 tiddlers on opening.

"Websites are like gardens," wrote the BMJ’s Richard Smith. "Turn your back on them
for a few weeks and they’re overrun with weeds in the form of out of
date coming events and hypertext links leading nowhere." It’s been rather longer than a few weeks, but I’m finally knuckling down to do some gardening over at my SFF site, to update the style of the website, and to consolidate and update all the various pages I have written over the years and still consider fit to print. It was actually 1997 that I applied myself to finding out what HTML was all about, perusing books on HTML in the reading room of the alas-now-closed National Science Library of Edinburgh, and built my first web-page, with the help of my notes and the NCSA’s classic "Beginner’s Guide to HTML", so that almost qualifies me as a senior netizen. The growth of technologies and creativity has been extraordinary – I certainly can’t claim to have kept up. Unfortunately, corruption, exploitation and pollution have also grown apace, but that’s a topic for another post.