Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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68 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bit of a damp squib, 14 Jun 2007
Andrew Keen has the right credentials to address the question of the cultural impact of the web and it is a subject of interest to me, so I was intrigued by the title and the reviews. However, I was really quite disappointed by the book. I now have some suspicions, rightly anticipated by Keen himself, about the reviewers who said it is "beautifully written" and the work of "an intellectual Goliath".
The style of the book is polemical, which in my view detracts from, rather than strengthens, his message. Andrew Keen's hypothesis is that the internet, or rather the mass contribution of its content by "amateurs", is a threat to "our culture and our values" or something that might destroy "the institutions of the past". At the centre of this hypothesis is the argument that the millions of amateur contributors of free, unregulated, biased, poor quality and downright untrue web content are undermining, obscuring or preventing the contributions of professionals (amongst which Keen presumably counts himself) which are high quality, truthful and . . er . . costly.
Yet I find his arguments are weak and contradictory, and the metaphors and anecdotes he uses often cut both ways. There are so many examples it is hard to pick one as an illustration. Keen quotes from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to provide a flavour of what might become of us through our mass ignorance and rejection of expert guidance - "Two plus two makes five" might eventually be considered true - but he misses the point that only in a totalitarian state could such an untruth be accepted as true. The "democracy" of the web is precisely the sort of mechanism that would prevent this being possible. He also stoops to some fairly crude character assassination in describing the background of those he disagrees with: "Drudge was a mediocre student who came to the media business via a job managing the CBS studio gift shop". I think Einstein was a mediocre student and worked as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office.
Keen also avoids two obvious questions - why should "our culture and values" not change - as they have been changing for centuries - and why should the "institutions of the past" not give way to the institutions of the future? Indeed, the essential success of the United States as an ecomonic and social power has been precisely because of its readiness to embrace the new and change its institutions to accommodate it.
In the end, Keen finds that the solutions to his problems are already emerging: the courts are being used to pursue flouters of copyright law; entrepreneurs previously behind mass contribution sites and blogging are starting to use experts and professionals to supply material and "maintain order". Perhaps the future is not so bleak after all. So why all the fuss?
Finally, an admission. I am one of Keen's much-vilified "amateurs". I do not review books professionally, nor would I consider myself to be well-read. But Keen's readiness to berate the "amateur" in the name of some "professional" and quite condescending superior authority got up my nose a bit and I felt compelled to respond.
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28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Confused, prurient, and amateur - a debate is needed, but this isn't the book to lead it., 24 Jul 2007
Since Andrew Keen is so instinctively dismissive about amateur contributors to the internet - people like me - it's hardly surprising that I should instinctively dismiss his book, so let me declare an interest right away: I like Web 2.0. I've been a contributor to it - through Amazon customer reviews, Wikipedia, discussion forums, MySpace, Napster and so on - for nearly a decade now, and I've followed the emergence of the political movement supporting it, exemplified by writers such as Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler, with some fascination. and no, I've never made a dime out of it (though I have been sent a few books to review, not including this one).
Andrew Keen is that classic sort of British reactionary: the sort that would bemoan the loss of the word "gay" to the English language, and regret the damage caused by industrial vacuum cleaners on the chimney sweeping industry. His book is an impassioned, but simple-minded, harkening to those simpler times which concludes that our networked economy has pointlessly exalted the amateur, ruined the livelihood of experts, destroyed incentives for creating intellectual property, delivered to every man-jack amongst us the ability - never before possessed - to create and distribute our own intellectual property and monkeyed around mischievously with the title to property wrought from the very sweat of its author's brow.
Keen thinks this is a bad thing; but that is to assume that the prior state of affairs was unimpeachably good. You don't have to be a paranoid Chomskyite to see the pitfalls of concentrated mass media ownership (Keen glosses over them), or note that the current intellectual property regime - which richly rewards a few lucky souls and their publishers at the expense of millions of less fortunate (but not, necessarily, less talented) ones, isn't the only way one could fairly allocate the risks and rewards of intellectual endeavour.
Keen's world is one where there is a transcendental reality; a truth, purveyed by experts, trained journalists, and in great danger of dissolution by the radically relativised truths of Wikipedia where the community sets the agenda, and if two plus two equals five, then it is five. So much Big Brother: Orwell's novel gets repeated mention, it apparently having escaped Keen that a media owned by a concentrated, cross-held clique of corporate interests - which is what the old economy perpetuated - looks quite a lot more totalitarian than publishing capacity distributed to virtually every person on the planet.
Keen laments the loss of a "sanctity of authorship" of the sort which vouchsafed to Messrs Jagger and Richards (and their recording company) a healthy lifetime's riches for the fifteen minutes it took to compose and record Satisfaction (notwithstanding their debt - doubtless unpaid - to divers blues legends from Robert Johnson to Chuck Berry) and seems to believe individual creativity will be suddenly stifled by undermining it. There's no evidence for this (certainly not judging by MySpace, the proliferation of blogs, Wikipedia, and so forth, as Keen patiently recounts), and no reason I can see for supposing it to be true on any other grounds.
On the contrary, Yale law professor Yochai Benkler in his excellent (and freely available!) The Wealth Of Networks has a much more sophisticated analysis: there is a non-market wealth of information and expertise - residing in heads like yours and mine - which the networked economy has finally unlocked, for the benefit of all, and at the cost of the poor substitute that preceded it. That this might have compromised the gargantuan earnings capacity of one latter day Rolling Stones (to the incremental benefit of a few thousand others) is far less of a travesty - and more of a boon - than Keen thinks it is. Now rock bands have to sing for their supper. Keen may regret that but, as a concert goer, I sure don't.
Keen also, irritatingly, keeps returning to the Monkeys and Typewriters analogy (writes your dear correspondent, a monkey). It is true there may not be much talent behind the infinite typewriters, but the evolutionary lesson is that there doesn't need to be, as long as we have tools, be they Google algorithms or manual reputation management devices (things like Amazon's "helpful review" voting buttons) to sort the wheat from the chaff. And like it or not, we *do* have these tools: they're the sine qua non of Web 2.0, the thing without which it would never have got off the ground.
And Wikipedia (or Linux, or eBay, or Amazon's customer review system) is potent evidence of that. That there are notorious cases, a few of which Keen recounts, doesn't detract from the fact that Wikipedia is largely comprised of brilliant articles, with helpful links and useful surrounding discussion, a complete history, and those articles that aren't so good are obviously not: all you need to pack for a visit is your critical faculties. Again, if the choice were blind faith in Encyclopaedia Britannica or a sceptical read of Wikipedia, I know which I'd have, and which I'd counsel for my children - especially since Wikipedia is automatically up-to-date, preternaturally following the zeitgeist, and replete with good know-how on things that Britannica would never have in a million years. Most of the time, we don't need a nobel-prize certified article, and in Britannica wouldn't get one anyway, if what we wanted to know about was *The Knights who say "Ni"*.
Elsewhere Keen misunderstands Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jaques Rousseau, the Correspondence Theory of Truth, implies that traditional media isn't systemically biased, assumes his fellow men have no sense of scepticism whatever (because something is watched on YouTube, Keen assumes it is necessarily believed true), and constantly fails to see the double standards in his own arguments: Complaining that traditional media is losing out to a swarm of unpaid, underresourced amateurs, Keen suddenly remarks "but in reality it's often those with the loudest, most convincing message, and the most money to spread it, who are being heard". Plus ca change, eh?
Lastly, Keen laments the passing of specialist record and book shops like Tower, whose "unparalleled" and "remarkably diverse selection" will be lost to us for ever. Clearly he's no online shopper then, since dear old Amazon would lick all of them put together - but Amazon, he says, lacks the dedicted expertise of sales assistants that could have stepped out of Nick Hornby's Hi Fidelity. Except that it doesn't, since it has literally millions of them - people like you and me - who can offer our tuppence worth gladly and without thought of recompense.
The thing is, there *is* a debate to be had here, though not quite the apocalyptic one that this author believes is necessary, and at times Keen touches on it, but his brimming prurience and needless moral disgust - at the cost of level-headed anlysis and expostion - towards a community which has simply adjusted to the new social envinronment more quickly than traditional political and business models have makes this a poor entry for the purposes of kicking off that debate.
In the mean time, Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and Lawrence Lessig's Code: Version 2.0 (neither of which Keen seems to have read) might be a better place for interested persons to start.
Olly Buxton
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40 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant example of internet marketing... dreadful book, 9 Aug 2007
One of the nicer ironies about this book is that much of the hype surrounding it seems to have been generated by the Web 2.0 crowd bashing it. I just bought it to see what everyone was so upset about.
Pointing out all the problems with this book seems to have become a popular sport on the internet, but that's about the only joy you're going to get out of it. Much of Keen's analysis is itself decidedly amateurish - he's no economist and not much of a cultural critic. Dropping in a few learned-sounding references to Neil Postman and various members of the Huxley family didn't, for me at least, really make up for that. It just reinforced the impression that this man was really just a bit of an intellectual snob who hadn't bothered to do his homework.
More to the point, the bulk of his problem with "amateurs" seems to be based on an unerring ability to compare apples and oranges. No, it's unlikely that today's top clip on You Tube is going to compare that well to Citizen Kane, but so what? By rather obviously cherry-picking the best of the mainstream media and making equally selective decisions the other way about the stuff on the web, Keen makes his arguments seem pretty arbitrary. I could compare Legally Blond 2 to a usenet science group and draw opposite, and equally random, conclusions. Neither really tells us much about what's going on.
This is a shame, because, as many of the other reviewers say, it isn't like there aren't some very valid concerns surrounding whether we'll work out how to pay for the culture we actually want in the "Web 2.0" age, not to mention privacy concerns, digital exhibitionism, etc. etc. Sadly, this book isn't going to tell you much about it.
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