The Daily Novel

I shipped my oar and watched. Mesmerised as the long narrow boat glided by. Four men in a boat not three. Not larking about but working hard, each pulling strongly on his oar.  Four individuals focused on a common aim, moving together in perfect harmony.  A thing of beauty. That is John Keats but I am in Shakespeare country, on the river at Stratford in front of the Memorial Theatre just after lunch on Sunday afternoon, in a rather ugly hired rowing boat, trying not very successfully to get two oars moving together so that I can move in a straight line, albeit backwards. But I don’t have to do anything. I have reached my destination. It is Sunday afternoon and I have driven 105 miles in search of a spot of tranquility. I did not know where I was going when I got up this morning. A short enough journey so that I could get there and back easily in the day. And therefore probably north or west because south or east means driving through half of London. Away from the crowds. Somewhere I could be alone with nature. The Chiltern hills beckoned but I also wanted some water at my destination. I thought maybe I would seek a quiet spot on the banks of the Cherwell but I could not think of one. So I settled for Stratford, guided by memories of tranquility from my boyhood when I used to cycle there from Wolverhampton. After all it is still April so the town should not be too busy.An hour or so ago I thought I had fouled up. The last few miles into Stratford took an age. Everyone seemed to be going to Stratford. The sixth car park had a few spaces and I managed to reverse into one on the sixth level without pranging the car. At ground level we joined with the other day trippers walking down to the river. The Americans were there in force. We bumped into one family eager to be friendly with the natives. So their red-headed daughter, Molly, sang me her favourite song, which turned out to be ‘The bells of St Clemens’.It turned out that today was on Open Day for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre with a series of events in which the actors were doing versions of street theatre in several places around town. We headed for the theatre restaurant overlooking the river. It was closed but we were told that we could still go there and have the café menu. We found one table free and I ordered fish and chips.As we waited I began to enjoy myself. I could see a succession of people tramping across the old bridge, but they were too far away for me to hear the tramp of their feet. Right across from me someone was feeding the swans, which as in my memory, seem to be the biggest and most imposing swans in the world. Then along came the waitress; very sorry, we have run out of food. So we traipsed back to the town, found a pub, and I ordered something called Posh Bacon and Eggs, which turned out to be very good with thick rashers of best bacon.Over lunch I got as far as Page Three of The Observer which is devoted to a book to be published in June by Andrew Keen, a Brit who now lives in California. It is called The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy. According to The Observer it

Accuses bloggers and other evangelists for the web of destroying culture, ruining livelihoods and threatening to make consumers of new media regress into ‘digital narcissism’.

Keen says that by 2010 there will be 500 million blogs

So dizzyingly infinite that they undermine our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary.

The Keen thesis, apparently, is that knowledge of history is being smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers. He attacks MySpace, the popular social networking site, now owned by Rupert Murdoch.

People of like minds congregate to confirm what they want. MySpace is not a community we should be proud of.

Maybe. But Keen cannot have it both ways. The teenagers on MySpace are talking about themselves, but they are talking to each other and listening to each other. To highlight the case of Kevin Whitrick, the Shropshire man who hanged himself in front of his webcam, as if it indicates a trend is misleading. The majority of content is nothing like this.Keen is on stronger ground when he attacks the way corporate interests are taking over the web. The internet entrepreneurs, of whom apparently Keen is one, devise sites which encourage user content, and their success creates an enormous potential market for the individual teenage blogger. But the reality is that only a minute portion of this vast readership reads most individual offering.Guardian/Observer, as we now know from the new ABC figures is reaching 13 million readers on Web 2.0. That fact surely gives the lie to any notion that the web is dominated by amateurs and that readers have lost their ability to distinguish between amateurs and the informed and professional views of most of the journalists producing this copy. It is perfectly true, as Keen asserts, that in Wikipedia you find a longer entry for Pamela Anderson than Emmeline Pankhurst. But this is nothing to do with the absence of editors at Wikipedia. You only have to look at British newspapers, where editors rule supreme, and where you find much more about Kate Moss and Kate Middleton. They frequently push Tony Blair and Gordon Brown off the front pages.Jeff Jarvis, the New York media academic who moonlights as a blogger and Guardian columnist, gets nearer to the truth about Web 2.0.

Keen sees the means of flattening culture. I see the means of people speaking.

Jarvis thinks that Keen is ‘militantly snobbish’. I agree and I am sure that Shakespeare, were he still around, would have had something pertinent to say about this issue. After lunch we tried to get into an event in a large marquee by the side of the river, where actors were using Shakespearean language to comment on issues of the day. We could not get in because it was full with a queue waiting for the next performance.So we went instead into the next tent, where there was a demonstration of props, including one that captivated all the boys. It was a guillotine with an appropriately bloodstained bucket beneath. The boy lay down, with his head in the hole, and on the count of five by the operator the blade was released with a convincing thud.I could have used this incident to rant on about how modern yoof was obsessed with blood and violence. I could have ranted on about the Shakespearean mugs and tea towells selling in the shops, as evidence of the debasement of the popular culture. But that would have meant ignoring the fact that people were also buying compact texts to read and low-priced volumes of the complete works. Today’s yoof has not entirely given up on reading books, despite the seductive qualities of television and the web. But my own belief is that if Will Shakespeare were alive today he would still be writing plays, but, as well, he would be moonlighting as a blogger.