The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy
by Andrew Keen
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| published
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June 5th 2007
by Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd
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| binding
| Paperback |
| isbn
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1857883934
(isbn13: 9781857883930)
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| ebook |
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| pages
| 240 |
| date added
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06-02-07
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Read in December, 2007
Based on the title, I thought this was going to be another book about the Bush Administration. But instead of being about the incompetence, hubris, cronyism, and greed that’s running our government and ruining our country, The Cult of The Amateur is about the incompetence, vanity, narcissism, and greed that’s running the Internet and killing our culture.
Overall, Keen’s polemic is a very relevant book and one I wish everyone would read. It’s sure to spark a lot of debate at dinner parti...more
Based on the title, I thought this was going to be another book about the Bush Administration. But instead of being about the incompetence, hubris, cronyism, and greed that’s running our government and ruining our country, The Cult of The Amateur is about the incompetence, vanity, narcissism, and greed that’s running the Internet and killing our culture.
Overall, Keen’s polemic is a very relevant book and one I wish everyone would read. It’s sure to spark a lot of debate at dinner parties between the second and third bottles of wine. So bring a fourth just in case. You won’t agree with a lot of what Keen asserts, and you shouldn’t, because like the Silicon Valley insiders he rallies against throughout the book, he too is out of touch with the majority of American Culture and how we as a whole use the Internet. Keen takes it all a bit too seriously. Everyone I know acknowledges the entertaining silliness of all the crap on YouTube and Craigslist, taking it with a grain of salt for what it is. Keen seems unable to do this. He is very upset about the questionable trappings of Wikipedia’s open forum and inherent problems, but he takes this site far more seriously than anyone I know. There have always been numerous resources in modern man’s world, some more reliable than others. How is this any different?
Very early into the book I found myself asking, is he too paranoid? Or has our technological culture in fact become a duplicitous web of spineless, lying predators? And if so, isn’t that just mirroring real life, which is full of duplicitous, spineless, lying predators?
Keen draws on a few misguided commercials supported by partisan bloggers in the 2004 and 2006 elections as evidence of an overwhelming “partisan minority that uses ‘democratized’ digital media to obfuscate truth and manipulate public opinion” (Swift Boat Veterans For Truth anyone?). Technology has certainly legitimized and given voice to the amateur, but when the rich and powerful continue to do so much more harm in this world, is it the extremist blogger we should be worrying about? The Government, The Church, The News, and Big Business have been taking swings at the Truth for so long, I guess it’s our turn at bat. Thanks, technology!
I categorically disagree with Keen’s assertion that every free classified ad on Craigslist is the loss of a paid classified advertisement to a newspaper. I post things on Craigslist because it’s free. If it wasn’t free I just wouldn’t post it anywhere, newspaper or otherwise. I feel the same way about downloading free music. I used to download songs because they were free. If I couldn’t have downloaded them for free, I wouldn’t have instead bought the CD, I wouldn’t have bought it at all. For the record industry to count every single download as a loss to its industry is just wrong. But it has clearly affected the industry (see the closing of Tower Records and the hundreds of other independent music stores), just nowhere on the scale that the greedy record industry claims. Having worked in promotions for a radio station, I know firsthand that if you show up anywhere in America at an amusement park or a bowling alley or a gas station or a fast food restaurant with t-shirts, keychains, and koozies to give away for free, you will be swarmed and raped until they are all gone. Every last cheap, menial, insignificant one of them. If you set up a table and charge for them, you will not get rid of a single one. That’s America.
Though I will agree with Keen’s opinion about Web 2.0 and its vicious mauling of Talent. He states that, “Talent, as ever, is a limited resource, the needle in today’s digital haystack. You won’t find the talented, trained individual shipwrecked in his pajamas behind a computer, churning out inane blog postings or anonymous movie reviews. Nurturing talent requires work, capital, expertise, investment.” Though this opinion of Keen’s is certainly likely to fall on disagreeing ears in this country as going directly against the American Dream. We are a nation adamant about The Big Hope. He are still hell bent on supporting and fulfilling the promises of Horatio Alger that we will insist on the “democratizing” values of Web 2.0 to be true. We have to believe that the cream rises to the top. For the time being anyway. Even as such a childish dream continues to chop away at the sturdy trees of talent. I agree, we are losing CRAFT. But this is not doomsday. There is a lot of excitement over the potential of technology and people’s vanity are definitely being exploited. I think the wave will roll back to sea eventually.
Keen insists on portraying the people of this Internet Revolution, this Web 2.0 culture as vain, narcissistic, self-fulfilling, and self-congratulatory. And I will not disagree with him. But I feel that it is more important to identify this generation of writers/bloggers, YouTubeing Videographers, and anonymous Amazon reviewers as direct descendents of Gonzo Journalism. We have Hunter S. Thompson to thank and blame for this incestuous parade of “self-congratulatory clusters,” “digital narcissists,” and “vanity presses.” As the great HST did not report on an event unless it included his interaction and presence in the story, so too have we demanded that it is US who is interesting. It is US who is important. It is US who dominates the primary narrative. It is our story, our world and we’ll be damned if any power will continue to dictate and pander to us anymore. The Good Doctor predated and predicted this entire genre and approach of living and interacting with the world around us. We are truly in the Gonzo World now. There is no going back. Are we Doomed? I sincerely do not know. But we better stock up on some Wild Turkey, grapefruits, and ammunition. Just in case.
Very simply, Keen comes across as very elitist. Like lamenting the loss of the horse and buggy upon the invention of the automobile, Keen weeps over the lowered prominence of newspapers and radio. Our hallowed institutions are crumbling. This is a Revolution. That is the point. Sadly, it is our blood too that is running in the street. Many of our own heads will find their way into the stock of a guillotine before the Queen follows suit. And follow suit she will. As Keen himself explains, “Such amateurs treat blogging as a moral calling rather than a profession tempered by accepted standards; proud of their lack of training, standards, and ethical codes, they define themselves as the slayers of the media giants, as irreverent Davids overcoming the news-gathering industry Goliaths.”
Rallying against the “Noble Amateur,” Keen displays a naïve faith in the current system. The Media, The Government, and The Church are also often wrong and have been forever. Keen takes issue with Web 2.0’s embrace of anonymity and its lack of transparency. But herein, Keen fails to acknowledge an inherent contradiction in his argument. He demands transparency while also damning the dangerous qualities of the Internet found in pornography, gambling, and identity theft. Does anonymity not provide safety and security in an environment so filled with such unscrupulous folk?
Today’s controversy surrounding Global Warming provides Keen with probably his best argument and most legitimate reason to attack Web 2.0 and its “values.” Since outlets such as Wikipedia allow for every single writer, no matter their expertise and lack thereof, equal space to share their pronouncements, today’s Internet has allowed for the mass publication of a generous helping of egregiously wrong information. Beyond being the true Gonzo Generation, this is the George W. Bush Era. It is a content, uninformed citizenry Out There, indeed. Is the Internet to blame?
But it is not the Internet or technology that is to blame for this misrepresentation, fraud, and identity theft, is it? I hate to be such an apologist, but isn’t this just human nature? Finally, us pedestrians, us groundlings can easily join the soiled, corrupted ranks of churches, criminals, governments, pirates, dictators, and henchmen.
Keen spends the final quarter of his book taking a moral lashing at the ills of the Internet. However significant, following the complex ethical arguments of the rest of his well-argued and researched book, his attacks on gambling and pornography seem out of place. It’s too easy a position to take. It’s like the politicians who publicly promise that they are, “against crime.” Well, no shit. The Internet is a filthy, disgusting, dangerous place unfit for young eyes. But so is the street I walk down everyday to go to work.
Keen quotes Paul Simon halfway through the book and Simon’s position seems to be the most reasoned, practical opinion to have about the entire issue. Simon says that, “I’m personally against Web 2.0 in the same way as I’m personally against my own death. Maybe a fire is what’s needed for a vigorous new growth, but that’s the long view. In the short term, all that’s apparent is the devastation.”
Andrew Keen is like one of those Southern California homeowners who recently lost their house in the fire and is sick of having some Silicon Valley yuppie tell him that his loss is for the best. So maybe we are flooding our own world, but at least we’re not relying on the powers that be to build inadequate levees and then to fail in providing for its plighted citizenry. We’re building those inadequate levees ourselves!
Finally, Justice....less
Check out my interview with Keen on THE FUTURIST Website:
From the Jan-Feb 2008 issue of THE FUTURIST
In his new book, The Cult of the Amateur, (Currency, 2007) blogger and Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen explores today's new participatory Internet, (often referred to as Web 2.0). He argues that too much amateur, user-generated, free content is threatening not only mainstream media—newspapers, magazines, and record and movie companies—but our very culture. We asked Keen what today's I...more
Check out my interview with Keen on THE FUTURIST Website:
From the Jan-Feb 2008 issue of THE FUTURIST
In his new book, The Cult of the Amateur, (Currency, 2007) blogger and Internet entrepreneur Andrew Keen explores today's new participatory Internet, (often referred to as Web 2.0). He argues that too much amateur, user-generated, free content is threatening not only mainstream media—newspapers, magazines, and record and movie companies—but our very culture. We asked Keen what today's Internet trends mean for the future of our increasingly Web-driven society.
THE FUTURIST: Summarize the basic premise of your book for us; what do you see as the great danger in the way the Internet is allowing millions of content creators to undermine established media?
Keen: I don't believe this is any kind of conspiracy. Most of the technologists behind Web 2.0 want to do well and they're decent people. The relationship between the rise of new media and the crisis of old media is causally complex. It would be a dramatic oversimplification to argue that the only reason mainstream media is in crisis is because of the Internet. They are intimately bound up with one another and are cause and effect, in some respects. But people stopped trusting and reading newspapers before the invention of the Internet. People, particularly in the U.S., have problems with all sorts of authority, with or without the Internet. It's a reaction against cultural authority.
It's no coincidence that most of the intellectual leaders of the Web 2.0 movement are children of the sixties. There's a book by Fred Turner of Stanford called Counterculture to Cyber Culture that traces the birth of Silicon Valley and today's Internet to people opposed to traditional forms of authority. When we look at Web 2.0 we're staring into a mirror. We're a society that's intent on exposing the unreliability and corruption of authority, whether that authority is an editor at a publishing house or newspaper, or an executive at a record label, or a producer in Hollywood, or a politician. The representatives of mainstream media have become a convenient punching bag, much like politicians.
The alternative to mainstream media, which is the Internet, is by definition untrustworthy because it doesn't have gatekeepers. It lends itself not to imagined corruption, but to real corruption. Ironically, the continual distrust of our supposedly unreliable mainstream media has given us a new media that is, by its very definition, unreliable.
FUTURIST: Was there a specific incident—perhaps something that you witnessed during your Silicon Valley days with Audiocafe—that convinced you that today's Internet is killing our culture?
Keen: I describe it in my book. I had an epiphany at an event called Foo Camp, which is Friends Of O'Reilly Camp. It's the classic Silicon Valley Unconference conference, with lots of people espousing jargon about democracy and interactivity and cultural flattening and openness. It was at that event in September 2004 that I had my transformation. I went from a digital believer to an unbeliever.
FUTURIST: What happened?
Keen: I just had enough of these wealthy Silicon Valley guys talking about democratization. It was the height of absurdity that these affluent people thought they knew what anybody else wanted culturally, politically, and mentally. It occurred to me that what was going on was intellectual fraud.
I think it's worth stressing that the book begins with this epiphany. The book itself, as a narrative, is premised on it.
FUTURIST: How do you see this trend evolving in the future? For instance, just as our technology habits got us into this mess, is it possible that a different, future technology might get us out?
Keen: I don't think this is a technology story. Hopefully, what's going on now will force people to realize that expertise does have value. Third parties—gatekeepers—add value to all media. They help produce much more truthful content. People will rediscover the value of expertise and authority figures who know what they're talking about, so I hope that Web 3.0, when it arrives, will reflect something new. Rather than the empowerment of the amateur, Web 3.0 will show the resurgence of the professional. Having talked to a number of people who are building their next-generation Internet businesses around proven expertise, I'm more optimistic now than when I first wrote the book. Many of the new Internet media startups pay the people who contribute content to their sites and don't allow them to hide behind anonymity.
FUTURIST: When do you think this change to Web 3.0 will be noticeable?
Keen: I think it's already happening. When you look at the Web sites like Mahalo.com (which is paying its contributors), HowThingsWork.com, and a number of other businesses I've written about, you see the change that's taking place. Smart people in Silicon Valley are now invested in those kinds of businesses.
But I have a feeling that the tipping point will come with something involving Google or one of the Google companies, like YouTube. YouTube is the driver of the Web 2.0 economy, and they epitomize the hypocrisy of Web 2.0, as well. They're making a fortune from the advertising sold around free amateur content, but they articulate this ideology of personal empowerment. I've seen some incredibly disturbing videos posted on YouTube. I think we're going to see a profoundly immoral example of how media—without a gatekeeper—lends itself to nastiness. That will be the low point.
The high point, so to speak, for Web 2.0 was when Time magazine voted "you" as the person of the year. I think we're going to look back at that as the PetFood.com moment.
FUTURIST: Is there anything else we might do now to reverse these trends?
Keen: One area I think we need to concentrate on is anonymity. I think it's one of the most corrosive things in the Web 2.0 world, and it lends itself to corruption, rudeness, vulgarity. I spent some time at Berkeley with a few research guys from Yahoo. All of their research shows that, whenever a site is dominated by anonymous posters, the quality of the content is dramatically lower than when the site encourages people to reveal their identities. I think that more and more business will come to understand that relying on anonymously produced content is actually a way of losing money.
For the rest of us, we need to ask ourselves, "Is Web anonymity really necessary in a democracy?" I just don't think it's justified unless you might be put in jail for your opinion.
The other great concern for me is media literacy. Young people need to understand the difference between Wikipedia and The New York Times online. There's a difference between a blog and book. I'm thrilled that education professionals out there are now teaching media literacy in schools. I think it needs to be taught not only in schools but also in universities.
FUTURIST: You've written a book, you blog online; what else do you do to get this message out there?
Keen: I'm doing a lot of speaking, I'm presenting to people in Vancouver. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be in Amsterdam, then London, then Greece, then Frankfurt. This is a message that's caught on. I've got translated versions of the book coming out in China, Taiwan, and Poland. The book is an opening salvo, a polemic to get people to think about these issues. I hope that after my book, people will write more thoughtful, scholarly works on this subject. My book is not a scholarly book. It's not a balanced book. It's an attempt to begin a conversation.
To read an excerpt from Keen's book where he discusses Foo Camp, go to: www.andrewkeen.typepad.com
This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker ....less
Read in February, 2008
Keen gets off to a dazzlingly bad start, misstating the concept of Google search on Page 6.
"The logic of Google's search engine...reflects the "wisdom" of the crowd. The search engine is an aggregation of the ninety million questions we collectively ask Google each day; in other words, it just tells us what we already know."
Is this intentionally dense? I mean, yes, Google uses the experiences others have had in some ways to create your new experience when you enter ...more
Keen gets off to a dazzlingly bad start, misstating the concept of Google search on Page 6.
"The logic of Google's search engine...reflects the "wisdom" of the crowd. The search engine is an aggregation of the ninety million questions we collectively ask Google each day; in other words, it just tells us what we already know."
Is this intentionally dense? I mean, yes, Google uses the experiences others have had in some ways to create your new experience when you enter a search query, but that's hardly the same thing as "telling you what you already know." If I want to know the year in which James Dean was born, and Google sends me to IMDb, which tells me it was 1931, sure, SOMEBODY had to know that already, but not me. And I was able to get there easily because IMDb has built up authority because...it's almost always right about everything! So what's the problem again?
Keen wants nothing less than to challenge all the Leading Thoughts about the Internet. Particularly the notion that providing the general population with the tools to create their own media content is in any way culturally beneficial. As I read the first few chapters of Keen's Web 2.0 smackdown, I would notice an odd statement here or there, but kind of dismiss it because I admired the overall scope of the project.
But it's hard to ignore some of the gaps in logic here, and by the final few chapters, as they started really piling up, I found myself completely losing my patience with the book.
I'd go so far as to call some of Keen's arguments intellectually dishonest. He surely knows this sort of reasoning doesn't hold together, but proceeds anyway.
A STAGGERING amount of the evidence presented in the book is anecdotal. What's more, most of these anecdotes don't apply specifically to the Internet and are not particularly illuminating.
For example, Keen opens a chapter about amateur reporting by discussing a 2006 hoax YouTube video made to look like a genuine German newscast. He clearly means for the story to illustrate how the Internet makes such fraud easier to disseminate and more commonplace, saying "Welcome to the truth, Web 2.0 style."
But in fact, wouldn't a savvy population with access to technology be more difficult to fool with such a hoax than one that was largely technophobic? Wasn't this hoax in fact quickly revealed to be fake? Keen says "Only those with the keenest of eyes could see that this YouTube video was not from the real Tagesschau," and he's probably right, but those individuals who did notice it probably got the word out that this was fake relatively quickly.
I mean, it's not as if phony newscasts are unique to the Web 2.0 era. I seem to remember Orson Welles pulling off a similar stunt on the radio a few years back...
The passage that really sums up all that is wrong with Keen comes early on, around Page 30, when I was still giving his screed a sporting chance. I quote:
"Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Robert Fisk, the Middle Eastern correspondent of the Independent newspaper, for example, didn't hatch from some obscure blog - they acquired their in-depth knowledge of the Middle East by spending years in the region. This involved considerable investments of time and resources, for which both the journalists themselves, and the newspapers they work for, deserve to be remunerated."
No, no, no, no, no, no and no. This is precisely wrong. I don't want to read Fisk because I owe him back wages for all the time and money he spent getting smart. I want to read him because he has an interesting and well-informed perspective. And the Independent pays him because I want to read him, and they want me to look at their advertisements, just like advertisers pay Atrios because millions of people want to read him every day.
Conversely, I DON'T want to read Friedman because, DESPITE his extensive years of experience and education, he's constantly wrong about pretty much everything. I mean, "DESERVE to be remunerated?" Is he joking? Friedman doesn't deserve anything but blame for helping to lead this country into a ruinous war and continuing to profit from his mistake to this day.
Keen's valuing a nice-looking resume over common sense, a diploma over decency. It's really mind-boggling to me that he would heap scorn on someone like Middle-Eastern scholar and blogger Juan Cole while singing the praises of all these professional journalists who have carried water for the Bushies lo these past 7 years. Sure, they've had experience, but what have they done with it? Bloggers are at least providing a different perspective than the monotonous drone of the Beltway crowd with its constant coverage of the campaign horserace and smack-like addiction to tawdry scandal.
I could raise more questions - doesn't every blogger start out an on "obscure blog"?; isn't it possible that a person could start a blog and also have in-depth knowledge about a certain subject? - but what would be the point? It's just rhetorical silliness, like arguing with one of the Keen's hated Internet trolls, particularly the final chapter.
After nearly 200 pages of ranting against every facet of the online experience, Keen offers up some ludicrous "solutions." Most of them are obvious, inoffensive statements that nearly everyone, even Internet evangelists, would probably suggest in some form or another. "Convicted sex offenders shouldn't use MySpace." "Search engines shouldn't save your information." "Parents should pay attention to what their kids look at online."
The remainder of Keen's "solutions" are coincidentally the exact ones that reactionary, corporate-friendly politicians have been offering up since the '90s. Weak....less
bookshelves:
2007,
sociology
Read in September, 2007
In a nutshell, the book comes close to making some valid points, but treats them so frivolously and superficially that by the end of the last chapter you feel like you've just spent an hour listening to your great-grandma's best friend Eileen talk about how much her corns are bothering .
Throughout the book, Keen lacks any sense of historical context. You feel like he believes that nothing happened in popular culture prior to 1990. He blames the internet for television's audience fragmentat...more
In a nutshell, the book comes close to making some valid points, but treats them so frivolously and superficially that by the end of the last chapter you feel like you've just spent an hour listening to your great-grandma's best friend Eileen talk about how much her corns are bothering .
Throughout the book, Keen lacks any sense of historical context. You feel like he believes that nothing happened in popular culture prior to 1990. He blames the internet for television's audience fragmentation, for instance, when in reality that has been a growing problem for networks since the 1980's and the rise of cable. He seems to think that YouTube gave birth to opposition research - but political candidates have been following each other around with video cameras long before the macaca scandal. He complains that now, people can "seek out the information that mirrors back our own biases and opinions and conforms with our distorted versions of reality" - like no one ever did that before. He claims that "efore the Web 2.0, independent media content and paid advertising existed separately, in parallel, and were easily distinguishable from each other." Like product placement in movies. He says "What happens to truth when politicians begin buying channels on YouTube to trash their opponents?" Well, probably the same damn thing that happened when they began buying airtime on television, or ad space in newspapers.
Keen is decidedly pro-establishment. He bemoans the fact that new are stealing time away from television and movies. Right, because TV and movies produce such top-quality entertainment every time. I'm sorry, but is Hamster Dance really that much worse than The War at Home? Is it such a tragedy if people start reading Perez instead of watching Access Hollywood? And I honestly believe that the Salad Fingers series (Google it) has more artistic value than Norbit, Silent Hill, and The Mangler 3: The Mangler Reborn combined.
The "amateurs" and "Web 2.0" that he denounces throughout the book aren't even responsible for his most virulent complaints. Peer-to-peer file sharing, for instance, with its impact on the entertainment industry, has been around much longer that "Web 2.0" and has nothing whatsoever to do with "democratized media." It's merely a technological innovation like the cotton gin.
In short, Keen is a Luddite. Every transitional technology is met with resistance from established technology providers. There's a period of time when people don't really know what to do with the new technology. And eventually the system corrects itself and life goes on. This is why it's called transitional technology. It's absolutely true that the legal system hasn't caught up with the internet and associated technologies - but it will. The entertainment industry will, too. And people will learn that you can't cite Daily Kos or WorldNetDaily in your term papers any more than you can cite the Enquirer. Basically, all he wants to do is "protect the legacy of our mainstream media and two hundred years of copyright protections." Which is fine. But if that's your goal, just say so in the introduction, not your final chapter, and deal with that issue - don't pretend you actually care about the minds and hearts of people when it all comes down to protecting industry.
Ah yes, his last chapter, titled "Solutions." Possibly the most annoying chapter in the whole book. What are Keen's brilliant, expert solutions?
- Adaptation of existing businesses to new technology
- Restructuring of web sites to provide higher quality content
- Adaptation of existing legal principles
- Parents being aware of what their kids are doing.
All of these have been happening, and they started long before this book was published, and Keen adds absolutely nothing original.
Way to anger the librarians!
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bookshelves:
digital-economy
Read in January, 2008
If you tend to get pulled into discussions about the pros and cons of social media, Andrew Keen’s “The cult of the amateur” is a good book to get you all fired up. It is full of holes, plenty of hyperbole, and comes across as an angry dissertation by someone who wanted to get things off his chest in a hurry. But that’s precisely why it’s important to check it out.
These are the kind of arguments someone in the room will bring up when debating whether comments ought to be moderated, ...more
If you tend to get pulled into discussions about the pros and cons of social media, Andrew Keen’s “The cult of the amateur” is a good book to get you all fired up. It is full of holes, plenty of hyperbole, and comes across as an angry dissertation by someone who wanted to get things off his chest in a hurry. But that’s precisely why it’s important to check it out.
These are the kind of arguments someone in the room will bring up when debating whether comments ought to be moderated, or the management team should care about comments by the ’stupid public’ in relation to a YouTube video.
Keen is the kind of person who would have dismissed Abraham Zapruder’s film as unreliable and amateurish, just because he was not a real journalist. Keen is very passionate about the morphing or passing away of the old media. Some of what he observes is accurate, about the digital economy, the downside of internet as an economic and communication conduit. The usual suspects are paraded: click fraud, Google bombing, anonymous Youtube videos (like the Penguin attack on Al Gore by a PR firm), online gambling, fake blogs etc.
For every Perez Hilton and Matt Drudge, bottom-up distribution through blogs, podcasts, Flickr and Digg has created discourse about journalism and law, for instance –from the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Lawrence Lessig and Glen Reynolds. He omits mention of how the pajama bloggers he vilifies fact-checked and checkmated Dan Rather. He would be terribly upset that NBC anchor, Brian Williams writes a blog, and that the queen of England released her Christmas day message through the same democratized distribution network that amateurs upload content, YouTube.
But Cult’s true weakness is in mixing up his argument about amateurism, with an argument about all things digital. To suggest that YouTube, Google, iTunes and CraigsList is causing the extinction of newspapers, television and record labels misses the reality about how these older media were structured, and how some of them failed to respond to changing audience behavior and interests. Smart journalists realize that this isn’t the slippery slope, and that they could adapt. A few weeks ago Dan Shearer, senior editor of the Mesa Republic hailed a citizen reporter for being the first responder with information and pictures of a church fire.
“Ignorance meets bad taste meets mob rule” does fit some of the awful content that passes for entertainment and news, but we haven’t said bye bye to the experts and gatekeepers. It’s just that they are different, and operate differently. To me “ignorance meets bad taste meets mob rule” has nothing to do with the democratization of media; it’s what we have put up for years on (sigh) the six-o-clock news on television, long before the digital tsunami hit.
Just for the record (I bet you’ve heard these arguments before) this is the lens through which Keen sees social media:
* Amazon: “chief slayer of the independent book store”
* YouTube: “a large commercial break”
* Google: a “parasite,” and “an electronic mirror of ourselves”
* Pastors who research sermons online are “plagiarists,” Lessig is “misguided,” and the internet is a “moral hazard.
There is hope. The last chapter, Solutions, does offer some ideas as to what could be done to save the world from going to hell in a hand-basket. But I won’t spoil it for you. It’s a book I still believe everyone even mildly involved in media and communications ought to read, after Wikinomics. When looking up Wikinomics on Amazon, it does not come up as “Customers who bought this item also bought,” recommendation. But then the “chief slayer of the independent bookstore” wouldn’t be reliable, would it?
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Has a copy to sell/swap
—
Read in June, 2007
recommends it for:
no one.
Given that Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, whose writings have appeared have appeared in a number of prestigious publications, I surmise that he is reasonably intelligent and well-informed about technology and culture. It is with great shock and disappointment that I read the book "The Cult of the Amateur."
Keen believes that all these empowered individuals (like you and me) are 1) poisoning civic discourse by blurring the lines between facts, inferences and opinions,...more
Given that Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, whose writings have appeared have appeared in a number of prestigious publications, I surmise that he is reasonably intelligent and well-informed about technology and culture. It is with great shock and disappointment that I read the book "The Cult of the Amateur."
Keen believes that all these empowered individuals (like you and me) are 1) poisoning civic discourse by blurring the lines between facts, inferences and opinions, 2) destroying excellence in culture by cutting, pasting, remixing and mashing up existing culture, and 3) destroying time-honored societal institutions like newspapers, the mainstream media, the recording industry and Hollywood.
You will find many ideas in the course of this book which have been suggested, vigorously debated, and ultimately rejected by the blogosphere, such as "Wikipedia is a stupid, poor man's version of the Encyclopedia Britannica," "anonymous blogs are a grave threat to public discourse," "journalism is a discipline like law or medicine, requiring rigorous training and certification," "blogs and their readers form an echo-chamber, a group of people who only listen to what they want to hear," "John Kerry was unjustly maligned by a small cadre of right-wing bloggers," and on and on. If the material in this book appeared in the form of a blog, it would be vigorously "fisked," examined on a page-by-page basis and ripped to pieces. It is ironic that Keen writes in glowing terms of Robert Fisk, the man from whom the term "fisking" comes, in the course of the book.
About a quarter of this book is an anti-blogosphere screed, with no balancing mention of mainstream media malfeasance, such as the attempt of the producers of 60 Minutes to influence the 2004 Presidential election with fradulent documents, or the leaking of confidential government information by the New York Times. Sometimes it gets personal, when Charles Johnson of little green footballs is referred to as "a rabidly pro-Israel blogger."
There are concerns raised later in the book about privacy, online gambling and online pornography. While I share his concerns about privacy, I reject the idea that its either a recent problem, or a problem with amateurs not bowing to the wisdom of their betters. While I'm in agreement with him that the cultural mainstreaming of gambling and pornography are unwholesome developments, I reject the idea that they have anything to do with the empowered individuals Keen finds so troubling in the first part of the book. It's almost as if he mentions every cultural problem that has something or other to do with the internet, and hoping that you'll associate it with the amateurs mentioned in the first part of the book.
Keen mentions in the introduction that he started to become disenchanted with Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 vision of the empowerment of individuals in September of 2004. And that is the hideous, horrible problem with this book. It is so September 2004. It is full of nostalgic longing for the day when the producers of 60 Minutes could decide who was going to be President, the day where Walter Cronkite could say "And that's the way it is," the day where the New York Times declared what was and wasn't newsworthy. The point of this book was that September 2004 is a better time than now, a point with which I vigorously disagree.
The only redeeming factor is that instead of just whining, he offers some websites at the end of the book that he sees as promising developments, such as Citizendium, Joost and iAmplify. He sees these websites as correcting the excesses of Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace, respectively. ...less
bookshelves:
know-your-enemy
Read in November, 2007
Often described as a polemic, "The Cult of the Amateur" is simply a screed against societal and economic change. It is a moralistic bombast against the populist notion of cooperation and collaboration in favor of a single point of reference determined and espoused by an expert. The author pulls out all of the goblins: narcissism, lying, thievery, gambling and pornography; to warn readers that their culture is under siege by know-nothing friends and neighbors bent on self-expressio...more
Often described as a polemic, "The Cult of the Amateur" is simply a screed against societal and economic change. It is a moralistic bombast against the populist notion of cooperation and collaboration in favor of a single point of reference determined and espoused by an expert. The author pulls out all of the goblins: narcissism, lying, thievery, gambling and pornography; to warn readers that their culture is under siege by know-nothing friends and neighbors bent on self-expression and actualization at the cost of a national dialog. To believe the premise, our society will unravel — even our economy is at stake! — if my neighbors and I allow ourselves to chronicle the times we live in without heeding the checks and balances of experts. We are, with each visit to Wikipedia, with each blog post and each download; jeopardizing jobs in traditional publishing, distribution and media. What purports to be a defense of our national character ends up being a defense of the hayday of mass media where three networks and a handful of newspapers made the news and controlled the water-cooler-conversations through a self-chosen circle of "experts." I have found it impossible to separate the words on the page from their outspoken author, Andrew Keen. Lacking direction and focus, Keen leaps from conclusion to conclusion often contradicting himself: as in his mourning the loss of niche knowledge among the staff of Tower Records and lambasting the uncontrolled blogosphere for perpetuating a never ending series of narrow interests. Keen’s academic pedigree shines through each sentence and illuminates his general distrust of the common man. This book is an unconscious paean to media darlings of a by-gone era: the condescending, idealistic academician as talking-head. Yes. Gambling can be dangerous and pornography is not for children. No. The crowd is not imbued with wisdom. Our society is experiencing significant growing pains and experimenting with new technologies and freedoms. Through seven chapters, Keen focuses only on the negative consequences of technological advances and condemns our innate human curiosity and expression as irrevocably bad. In the eighth and final chapter, Keen finally allows that there are benefits and acknowledges that we may yet reign in this beast of Web 2.0 and realize our own folly. He might be right. We may yet welcome experts into our conversations, should they decide to participate rather than instruct. Doing so will strike a balance between narcissistic echoes in the blogosphere and self-referential experts espousing their wisdom. It is a bit of a strain to think how Keen, after seven chapters of self-righteously divisive language, can make that allowance; but the final chapter is a welcomed return to reality and pragmatism. If you must read this book, I highly recommend checking it out from an American library—where royalties are not paid....less
bookshelves:
annoying,
inspiring,
read-2008
Read in August, 2008
recommends it for:
webby types
On the one hand this is a very ranty and kind of confused argument about how there's lots of crap on the internet. Which is kind of an obvious statement and which ignores the fact that there's lots amazing stuff online as well. On the other hand it makes some good points about the consequences of over-estimating the worth of user-generated content.
Keen's "beware the amateurs they make everything shit" argument is initially directed against Web 2.0 (and I should point out that he's ...more
On the one hand this is a very ranty and kind of confused argument about how there's lots of crap on the internet. Which is kind of an obvious statement and which ignores the fact that there's lots amazing stuff online as well. On the other hand it makes some good points about the consequences of over-estimating the worth of user-generated content.
Keen's "beware the amateurs they make everything shit" argument is initially directed against Web 2.0 (and I should point out that he's an insider when it comes to the online stuff, so it is an expert opinion, however ranty it may be), but then the book broadens its scope to include things like online piracy, porn and gambling.
These things seem to me to be distinct from Web 2.0 and the problems inherent with amateur content. It's like he's trying to come up with as many reasons as possible that the internet is bad, and he comes across as a bit of a shrill and histrionic luddite - which he obviously isn't - as a result.
There are good points made, though, about things like the economic impact and cultural flow-on of things like file sharing and free classified listings. Newspapers and record companies will indeed have to come up with ways to deal with the new playing field, and this will impact on writers and musicians (as well as other creative types), but it feels like Keen is simply railing against change more than anything else.
It made me think of the Douglas Adams quote about technology whereby any tech that exists when you're born is perfectly natural, and any tech that is developed after you turn thirty is an abomination.
The last chapter is the best of the book. It presents a "where to now?" scenario that is optimistic, engaging and hopeful in a way that the rest of the book is not. It's a nice counterpoint to the shrill complaints and soapboxing that come before. You have to wade through some cranky stuff (as in "that guys's a crank!"), but it's sort of worth it.
I'm not saying this book was a waste of time - it got me thinking about some interesting stuff, and it did make some good points about making sure that creative people are rewarded for their efforts so that they can go on being creative people. I just didn't like the vaguely elitist line he drew between "experts" and "amateurs".
If nothing else, this is a good book for anyone who loves reading the letters to the editor so that they can scream at their partners about how this guy is such a freakin' idiot!...less
The Internet of the 21st century, also called Web 2.0, has become a participatory marvel, letting anyone post anything, anywhere, without having to go through, or be approved by, anyone. According to this book, that is also its biggest drawback, not just for the Internet, but for all of American culture.
The two biggest culprits in the destruction of American culture are the sites Wikipedia and YouTube. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit at any time. It doesn’t matter ...more
The Internet of the 21st century, also called Web 2.0, has become a participatory marvel, letting anyone post anything, anywhere, without having to go through, or be approved by, anyone. According to this book, that is also its biggest drawback, not just for the Internet, but for all of American culture.
The two biggest culprits in the destruction of American culture are the sites Wikipedia and YouTube. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit at any time. It doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t know anything about the subject of the entry they are changing. It also doesn’t matter if the edited information is totally wrong, or downright malicious. No approval is required. The legitimate encyclopedias are suffering greatly; people would rather use Wikipedia with its potentially wrong information. YouTube is the video equivalent of Wikipedia. Again, anyone can post anything, with no thought given as to whether or not the video is accurate or fair.
The author explores the near-destruction of the music business by file sharing and downloading; the movie business is not far behind in terms of Internet-caused damage. The site craigslist has done major damage to newspaper ad revenue, a major source of money. Newspaper readership is steadily dropping, as people go to blogs for news, leading to the possibility of journalism becoming totally advertiser-driven, which would mean covering little more than celebrities, diets and self-help. Anything can be cut, pasted and re-mixed, putting great pressure on concepts of copyright and ownership. A major assertion of the author is that there are no “gate-keepers” on the Internet, no one to help the average person discover what information is, or is not, accurate.
There is hope on the horizon. In 2006, one of the creators of Wikipedia started Citizendium, a wiki encyclopedia but with experts who have the authority as the final word in their area of specialty. Legislation has been passed to protect kids from predators on sites like MySpace, but parents have the primary responsibility to know what their kids are doing online.
Lest anyone think otherwise, this is not some back-to-nature, anti-technology rant; the author is a Silicon Valley insider. This book is worth reading and recommended for everyone, from those who live on the Internet, to those who want nothing to do with it.
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bookshelves:
contemporary-culture
recommends it for:
Luddites
I love a good anti-internet polemic as much as the next girl. In fact, I actually thought I'd be the one person in my workplace to secretly love this book as I am part-curmudgeon and just don't get "these kids today" with their truthiness and solipsism. But, man, this book was truly terrible -- poorly researched, free of historical context and alarmist. It's like when the Frankfurt School got their panties in an uproar over that new-fangled radio thingee except Keen doesn't have half t...more
I love a good anti-internet polemic as much as the next girl. In fact, I actually thought I'd be the one person in my workplace to secretly love this book as I am part-curmudgeon and just don't get "these kids today" with their truthiness and solipsism. But, man, this book was truly terrible -- poorly researched, free of historical context and alarmist. It's like when the Frankfurt School got their panties in an uproar over that new-fangled radio thingee except Keen doesn't have half the philosophical heft as Adorno.
The text moves from "Wikipedia needs editors" to "I'm bummed Tower closed" to raving about "the children, protect the children" -- insulting the great "monkey" unwashed all the way. His assessment of the internet fails to take into account curation, filtering mechanisms, subscription services (eMusic gets a small nod towards the end) and open source technologies that have allowed NON-amateurs to seize the means of production after having been shut out by mainstream tastemakers for the better part of the Twentieth Century. (As a consultant for The Future of Music Coalition's International Artist Project, I'm thinking particularly of musicians who hail from outside of Keen's eurocentric frame of reference.)
Speaking of Keen's perspective on music and remixing, does remixing Dylan diminish the original, or does it reify its authenticity? I'm not entirely sure. Maybe, Baudrillard could tell us. But, the point is that Keen's arguments aren't complex or original. And, they don't amount to more than, say, a series of blog posts by one of your more evolved monkeys.
I really am all for taking on the detrimental affects of online social networks, advertising and the incessant, flattery-filled "you"-ness of contemporary culture, but pound for pound, I'll take Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live It over The Cult of the Amateur any day.
(Ok, one more thing, I know Keen isn't willing to raise those user-generating amateurs above monkey-level, but he's got to grant internet users a little agency. In his book, we're all constantly being duped, unable to filter out the crap or, for God's sake, turn off our bloody computers every now and again... which I'm going to do right now.)...less
Read in January, 2007
recommends it for:
No one
The main theme of Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, can be summed up in a few sentences. Unfortunately for Keen, these were uttered 46 years ago, and by someone else talking about an earlier media “threat” to our way of life.
“When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better,” said FCC chairman Newton Minow in a now-famous 1961 speech. “But when television is bad, nothi...more
The main theme of Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, can be summed up in a few sentences. Unfortunately for Keen, these were uttered 46 years ago, and by someone else talking about an earlier media “threat” to our way of life.
“When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better,” said FCC chairman Newton Minow in a now-famous 1961 speech. “But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there…until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.”
Keen’s book is a polemic that targets “today’s internet,” or Web 2.0., rather than television. His most pungent bile is reserved for user-generated social media, such as blogs, wikis and video-sharing sites. According to Keen, millions of preening, narcissistic, know-nothing “amateurs” are “perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.”
Furthermore, Keen contends, Web 2.0 is threatening our legacy of trusted print and media professionalism, is damaging intellectual property rights, destroying musicians’ and journalists’ and writers’ livelihoods, eroding our faith in advertising (?!) and, predictably, stealing the innocence of our children.
Indeed. Wikiality is taking over the world, and the sky, it’s, you know, falling.
Today’s internet is certainly changing our culture. But killing it? Hardly. In fact, I’d argue that the Gutenberg press, which ushered in a new era of print media in the 15th century, was far more disruptive. Then, more efficient printing led to a more rapid dissemination of information that in turn spawned revolutions (social, religious, scientific) that we’re still feeling the effects of half a millennium later.
It’s possible that this little user-generated content revolution of ours will be as disruptive, but somehow I doubt it... read the rest at:
http://ypnblog.com/blog/2007/0...
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bookshelves:
currently-reading
I am still reading this, and will possibly stay up all night finishing it. I will stay up all night finishing it because it is that readable and that important. Notice that I do not say "correct"; there are parts of it with which I disagree, parts of it (bloggers dodging jail time for their writing) that time has proven incorrect. It is, Keen has admitted, intentionally polemical and therefore slightly overblown. But it works wonderfully in two ways.
1) It is a beautiful stab-in...more
I am still reading this, and will possibly stay up all night finishing it. I will stay up all night finishing it because it is that readable and that important. Notice that I do not say "correct"; there are parts of it with which I disagree, parts of it (bloggers dodging jail time for their writing) that time has proven incorrect. It is, Keen has admitted, intentionally polemical and therefore slightly overblown. But it works wonderfully in two ways.
1) It is a beautiful stab-in-the-face to Internet 2.0 culture, a glorious attempt to assess just how it might be dragging us into a ditch. The book nicely suggests that Youtube sucks, the NY Times gets nothing when you go their website, things like Goodreads are for fools, and Amazon sucks when it destroys your local book store. These complaints are old news, in the sense that they get made by folks like the RIAA, MPAA, and those generally characterised as the villanous old media, and are ethical issues that have been floating around without good resolution for some time. Also, simply naysaying makes me glad.
2) IT RAISES QUESTIONS, and I can't explain how wonderful that is. We are surrounded by social networks - facebook is already losing ground among the cool kids, we are at the heart of an internet boom, and it is utterly and completely refreshing to have someone raise their hand and say, essentially, "I think this sucks, here's why, now go prove me wrong." Keen's theories about how advertising is changing, and about what's coming next are compelling, but demand research. And that's what the book makes you want to do. It makes you want to question, to think, to look around a bit. The number of one- and two-star reviews its pulling on Goodreads is proof-positive that it's riling people in the community up, and that's its point. NOT to be certain (though certainly pessimistic), but to make you think.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I must finish....less
Read in August, 2008
The Internet is a lot like Faust: It began with the loftiest ideals of changing the world and ended up playing games with the pope's hat. Keen doesn't use this comparison, but he could have. And I don't disagree with him. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
And for the most part, I don't disagree with his points, only their gravity. Is the Internet an “endless digital forest of mediocrity?” Yes. It is; but I still love Ask A Ninja and French Maid TV. Is Wikipedia untrustworthy? Yup. I...more
The Internet is a lot like Faust: It began with the loftiest ideals of changing the world and ended up playing games with the pope's hat. Keen doesn't use this comparison, but he could have. And I don't disagree with him. But I wouldn't have it any other way.
And for the most part, I don't disagree with his points, only their gravity. Is the Internet an “endless digital forest of mediocrity?” Yes. It is; but I still love Ask A Ninja and French Maid TV. Is Wikipedia untrustworthy? Yup. It is still the first place I go to for info. Can anyone with a guitar and garageband put music on the web, bypassing the industry intermediaries that supposedly “build talent.” Yup. But let's not forget that managers, ad execs, engineers and talent scouts created boy bands and bubblegum pop stars. DIY musicians are just getting their share.
This is essentially the same argument that Theadore Adorno made in The Culture Industry, only 60 years later Myspace, Pandora and Youtube have replaced the record and 'light' television. These are also the same arguments raised against the Novel all throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Clumsy prose rife with failed attempts at being clever and a propensity for rhetorical questions and hypotheticals make this book almost as difficult to read as it is frustrating. Keen uses T.H. Huxley's Infinite Monkeys Theorem as a conceit for amateur generated content, which falls far short of being a potent rhetorical trope and essentially serves to let Keen refer incessantly to anyone who has ever posted a blog or youtube video as monkeys; which casts him as the jaded apostate internet entrepreneur who is indignant that more people aren't listening to Bach (like he does) and reading important news publications (like he does), that he admits to being in the introduction.
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Read in January, 2008
Everyone is talking 2.0, a term that implies improvement, but Andrew Keen argues in The Cult of the Amateur that Web 2.0 is elevating amateurs above experts and ruining our culture. The prime examples of Web 2.0 are wikipedia and youtube, both of which rely on user generated content to draw eyeballs to the advertising space they sell. Keen believes sites like these, along with illegal content downloads (primarily music but video is just down the like), are edging out the professionals who produc...more
Everyone is talking 2.0, a term that implies improvement, but Andrew Keen argues in The Cult of the Amateur that Web 2.0 is elevating amateurs above experts and ruining our culture. The prime examples of Web 2.0 are wikipedia and youtube, both of which rely on user generated content to draw eyeballs to the advertising space they sell. Keen believes sites like these, along with illegal content downloads (primarily music but video is just down the like), are edging out the professionals who produce content (news, music, video, etc.) for a living in favor of amateurs who work for free. He argues that this phenomenon is bad for culture because it offers few rewards for the hard work that creativity requires.
His is a compelling argument if you can get past his occasional potshots at the ACLU, but it only goes so far. It is difficult to ignore the fact that many creative people create with very little promise of compensation. They do it for love. It is also difficult to imagine that the marketplace for creativity won't help sort the good from the bad.
The library world is also abuzz with 2.0 because we compete with it and because we could use more of it: our catalogs should provide the amazon.com style functionality that allows readers to share reviews. Database users should be able to save, notate and annotate the information they find. So 2.0 has great applications to library resources, if our Web 2.0-trained users can ever find them. And that is what worries me. Some students seem to believe that anything outside the world of web is irrelevant or unworthy of the effort. But if they cannot or will not use published sources, they still need to be able to distinguish high quality information from schlock, and Web 2.0 doesn't always make that so easy....less
Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
folks interested in Web 2.0 and technology
I expected to be upset by this book. I was. This is no more than a poorly reasoned and weekly supported anti-Web 2.0 rant by a failed Internet entrepreneur. His claims that the participatory nature of Web 2.0 will ruin culture because it removes the highly trained cultural gatekeepers (publishers, record and move producers, etc.) from the equation of what we read, watch, listen to, etc. is ludicrous. If these gatekeepers were providing such high quality content the 2.0 revolution wouldn't be...more
I expected to be upset by this book. I was. This is no more than a poorly reasoned and weekly supported anti-Web 2.0 rant by a failed Internet entrepreneur. His claims that the participatory nature of Web 2.0 will ruin culture because it removes the highly trained cultural gatekeepers (publishers, record and move producers, etc.) from the equation of what we read, watch, listen to, etc. is ludicrous. If these gatekeepers were providing such high quality content the 2.0 revolution wouldn't be an issue (and they never would have allowed this disaster to be published). Folks read blogs, watch viral videos, and discover new music via digital sources because it is what the want to do. I could go on and argue him point by point but... Most laughable is his silly lament for the loss of soulless mega-store Tower records, which he argues had huge depth of selection. Yeah right, it has never been as easy to find obscure music as it is now with iTunes and other digital music services (although they could do better in the bluegrass arena). In the last few chapters he ties online gambling and porn into his argument though these have nothing to do with Web 2.0. What a mess!...less
Read in July, 2007
While Keen does make some interesting points, his constant railing against all aspects of Web 2.0 grows old. We get it. You don't like user-created content, at least when it is created by people other than yourself (more on this later). Keen might be trying to get us to rally to the cause of saving the Internet, but in the end one can't help but wonder if he is just a bitter man who missed the 2.0 boat.
As one can expect from the title of the book, he is not fond of amateurs, stating that pr...more
While Keen does make some interesting points, his constant railing against all aspects of Web 2.0 grows old. We get it. You don't like user-created content, at least when it is created by people other than yourself (more on this later). Keen might be trying to get us to rally to the cause of saving the Internet, but in the end one can't help but wonder if he is just a bitter man who missed the 2.0 boat.
As one can expect from the title of the book, he is not fond of amateurs, stating that professionals are far superior. Either he had his book edited by amateurs, or professionals aren't as great as he thinks they are, since I found at least 3 glaring typos or grammatical errors in the first 100 pages of the book. It was obvious that this book was rushed to print so everyone involved could cash in. The author's credibility suffers greatly as a result.
And the final kicker in all of this: while Keen has written about the evils of bloggers, Youtube and web tracking, all 3 are right there in plain view on his own website. I guess these things are only bad when other people are using them, not when you're trying to promote a 200-page book that costs $22.95. I'm just glad I got this one from the local library....less
