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The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture
by Andrew Keen

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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/498285.The_Cult_of_the_Amateur_How_today_s_Internet_is_killing_our_culture?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175264933m/498285.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/498285.The_Cult_of_the_Amateur_How_today_s_Internet_is_killing_our_culture?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/277706.Andrew_Keen">Andrew Keen</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16052972?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 2 of 5 stars 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.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/894900?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Lon's review
rating:

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 th...more

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message 1: by Philip

07/05/2008 06:22PM

The Spaghetti Harvest was before the age of the internet too.