Richard Heene and the Reptilians

In The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keen writes that "The noble abstraction behind the digital revolution is that of the noble amateur." In lambasting the noble amateur, Keen posits two camps: "the dictatorship of expertise" and "the dictatorship of idiots." In Keen's eyes, you can't trust the idiots.

Although I agree with Keen's premise -- plenty of stuff on the Internet is "free and worthless," there is no shortage of "user-generated trash" -- I wouldn't call the advent of user-generated media a "cultural catastrophe." In fact, the further I read in Cult of the Amateur, the more I wished Keen would stop being such a killjoy/wet blanket/stick-in-the-mud and lighten up.

Yes, this is Keen's "end of the world" jeremiad. Yes, he's the lovable curmudgeon. But these are the same charges that were leveled against the "boob tube" (100 channels on cable and still nothing to watch; what does HBO stand for? Hey, Beastmaster's On). We've heard all the talk of "dumbing down," of "new media" ushering in a "cultural wasteland."

Keen is absolutely right: unless information is derived from reliable, authoritative sources, people can be misled. Our body of knowledge can be degraded by a steady infusion of questionable, dubious, and -- indeed -- worthless "reportage," speculation masquerading as information. However, there's an important part of the equation that Keen seems to overlook -- the responsibility of the reader.

The discerning reader, like the discerning eater, doesn't feast solely from a trough of slop. S/he knows the difference between what's nourishing and what's enervating. And realizes that, occasionally, you can step outside your diet, indulge in that tasty morsel or sinful treat.

As for the "the dictatorship of idiots": as someone who's paused in the checkout lane to thumb through the Weekly World News, there's something to be said for the idiots. Case in point: the Balloon Boy saga that dominated websites and news channels the past week. Just the latest "child stuck in a well" stunt you'll say. Further evidence of that age-old dictum: you can't go wrong appealing to the prurient and sensational.

In a media world abuzz with commentary, gawker's "Deflated: Balloon Boy's the Story of Our Ugly Sorry Era" argued that

the story of the boy in the balloon, filled as it was with real feelings of terror and relief, is a painful illustration of the sorry state of a reality TV-addled culture....

...Gawker is as bad as everyone else. We were part of the assembly line. But we also know that the page view counts on our reality show recaps dwarf anything we put up on, say, the death spiral of the publishing industry.

Bad, bad gawker. Beyond the failings of the news industry, at worst, the Balloon Boy is the story of "misunderstood" storm-chaser (or callous, manipulative publicity hound) Richard Heene.

On the face of it, a sad, lurid tale. But a tale that, in many ways, speaks to the human experience. A tale that, to be fully relished, requires the Internet. Because the beauty, and the value, of the Internet is in its immediacy and efficiency, in the sense of community (no matter how shallow/illusory/false) it creates. Nowhere else but the Internet does the Balloon Boy story branch off into so many fascinating tangents. Just click a link and...

You find "I Helped Richard Heene Plan a Balloon Hoax" (also on gawker.com) with testimony from Robert Thomas, who served as a scribe and gofer for Heene. Thomas relates that Heene

was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians — the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses.

Click on the Reptilians link and you go to Wikipedia (one of Keen's favorite whipping boys). You learn that

A theoretical reptilian humanoid has... been the focus of a widely discussed thought experiment in speculative evolution. In particular, in 1982 paleontologist Dale Russell, curator of vertebrate fossils at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa, conjectured a possible evolutionary path that might have been taken by the dinosaur Troodon (then called Stenonychosaurus) had they not all perished in the K/T extinction event 65 million years ago.

Amazing. Or you happen across a link to David Icke, one of the leading proponents of the "Reptilian Agenda":



And you chuckle to yourself. Knowing that you take any of this seriously at your own peril. Well aware that the concept of "lizard men" has been around for decades. Was, in fact, a mainstay of pulp fiction, going back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard:

In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and King Kull stories, the heroes are often pitted against a race of Serpent Men, shape-shifting reptilians with supernatural and hypnotic capabilities, who formerly dominated mankind and who plotted their return by infiltrating human society and becoming leaders.

And that's one of the key (addictive) qualities of the Internet -- its boundless, inescapable, unstoppably refreshed entertainment value. Dare I say, one of its many benefits.

So take a chill pill, Mr. Keen. Get off your high horse. Join the idiots, if only for a minute. Go ahead. Laugh at the lizard men.