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On the 9th of April I was, together with Giselinde Kuipers and Niels van Doorn from the University of Amsterdam, in a panel to discuss Andrew Keen's book The cult of the amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy.

Keen is a bitter ex-believer in the dot-com dream, who failed to make money with Internet business models in Sillicon Valley. He found out that the only way to make money with self-created content is by writing a book about how bad the Internet is. Sounds familiar?

Keen's business card tells he is 'the antichrist of Sillicon Valley'. On the flipside of his card – yes, I have one! – a picture of his book, plus a recommendation from the New York Times: 'shrewdly argued, he writes with acuity and passion'. Passion, yes – acuity and accuracy no, as Karin Spaink so eloquently had told him in the night before. He was not amused, he told us. Duh.

I think Andrew Keen is a victim of the Web 2.0 hype. He is a believer of the hype, though an inverse believer. Plain believers think that finally on Web 2.0 users are in control. And that this is good, that it brings democracy, equality and truth. Inverse believers also think that users are in control on Web 2.0, but that this is bad: an assault on quality, culture and objective truth.

But they are both wrong. Users are not in control on Web 2.0; software is.

Here is the text I spoke on this occasion.

Andrew Keen wrote a really important book about today's Internet culture. Not that I agree with the ominous and provocative English subtitle: 'How today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy.' Killing and assaulting, in the Dutch translation even our civilization – come on…. But transforming, yes indeed. And we better be aware of this. This book shows how extremely serious we should take this awareness, or the lack of it. My claim is that this urges for media literacy.

Keen's book assembles anecdotes and opinions on all kinds of Internet-issues, ranging from old time classics as identity fraud, spoofs, spam, child pornography and piracy, to Web 2.0 issues like the rise of user generated content and the sneaky exploitation of user generated data. Recurring theme in the book is the blurring line between truth and lies, between quality and bullshit.

That is an important theme. Being able to distinguish between these instances is one of the main goals of media literacy. What exactly is media literacy? In Dutch we don't have a proper translation for the term 'media literacy', reason why the Board of Culture proposed the concept 'media wijsheid', media wisdom (which also works in English). I like that term, it resonates both the tacit wisdom of the crowds – folk wisdom and common sense – and the wisdom of intellectuals, of independent thinking. The term wisdom does not refer to codified authoritative knowledge but to the critical questioning of any form of mediated knowledge, be it by newspapers or blogs. Or books.

Media literacy or wisdom is more than just media education. It is more than just teaching knowledge, for instance at school, about what mass media are, how they work, and how they might manipulate our world view. New media, that is digital and networked media, are not classical mass media – as the masses here are not just receiving but also contributing and criticizing. They contribute with their private issues, interests, sorrows and obsessions, taken form the heart of their daily lifes or from their particular expertise. So this new media wisdom should also be about how mass contributions work, how they mix and clash with classic media and business models, how they mix and clash with daily life, society and politics, and how these things are transformed by these mixes and clashes.

This implies that new media literacy does not come from the shelve, as an educational package to be learned at school; it means life long alertness and learning, for all citizens. It implies historical awareness of different, converging and diverging media, and it implies what I call software awareness; awareness about the software which runs on our computers and on the Internet, and how this code relates to the back offices of databases and business models. This implies questions such as: how does a Blogger-script work, how do MySpace or Facebook earn their money? What are cookies doing? What kind of data do I give away on the fly? How do search engines compute their results?

To answer these questions one should not assume anything beforehand. Not that software is a secret black box in the hands of the powers that be, or the powers that wannabe (since software is always open to hacking and cracking) neither should it be assumed that users are in complete control, as the current Web 2.0 hype claims.

Take for instance Google, the most powerful portal to internet information for us all. It is important to know how Google works. Google's algorithms has been criticized a lot because of their built in conservative stance, but really, the ranking on a Google search results page is not affected by the number of clicks on that site, as Keen repeatedly suggests in his book. Users are not that powerful. Software is powerful. Google's PageRank is determined by a lot of variables: the number of incoming links, the number of outgoing links, the reputation and age of these linking sites, their history with their domain registrars et cetera. That's why search optimization companies create so called link farms, that is fake-websites linking exuberantly to the website which needs a boost. People should know this about Google and about search optimizers. Especially when they write books about it.

Most of all, media wisdom means being critical on whatever you read or see, again regardless whether it comes form a blog, an encyclopedia or a book. The myth of independent media as neutrally, objectively and truthfully transmitting messages has been dissolved thoroughly by media scholars, but it still circulates, not in the least in Keen's book. But indeed, since online advertising is trying out other models instead of spam and pop-ups, we really should learn to discern viral marketing and propaganda passing as impartial content.

Media wisdom thus implies taking a good look at websites. Let's have a look at for example Wikipedia. Keen thinks the problem with Wikipedia is that it is unreliable because any silly amateur can contribute. In 2005 the scientific journal Nature did a comparative research between Wikipedia and Brittannica and found that the average scientific entry in Wikipedia contained four errors or omissions, while Britannica had three. So far for the experts.

Of course you can say that that means that Wikipedia is still 30 percent more cranky, but more interesting is how the Wikipedia website is designed to be permanently self-aware about its possible bugs. The site displays warnings when the content seems to be partial, outdated, or in need of sustaining quotes. Moreover, each entry has an edit, discussion and history page (check the tabs above every entry!). That's media wisdom 2.0: always read the discussions on a Wikipedia entry! There you can find the debates and editor's wars, and make up your mind about the reliability.

In general Wikipedia is as reliable or unreliable as any encyclopedia. Keen writes triumphantly that the 'Middlebury College history department' banned their students form citing Wikipedia. Big deal. And wrongly taken. We at the Utrecht programme New Media and Digital Culture also forbid our students to do so. Not because Wikipedia is unreliable, but because Wikipedia is, like any encyclopedia or dictionary, a secondary source (or better a tertiary source). Tertiary sources should be used as much as possible, to broaden your knowledge, to contextualize, to check facts, to double check, to trace debates and quarrels, to find primary sources – but they should never be quoted in academic work.

We want our students to be critical. We want them to read and appropriate as many books, journals and Internet sources as they can. Academic stuff, expert stuf, popular stuff. Whatever they can lay their hand on. We even allow them to use Keen's book – an amateur book, as the author himself acknowledges in his last chapter. To read, to quote, and to criticize. Because there is a lot to criticize. What's more, we recommend the book. In order to sharpen their critical stance and media wisdom.