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Management Today, June 2007
"The Cult of the Amateur needed to be written and it needs to be
read."


Book Description
"Marvelous and provocative... I think this is a powerful stop
and breathe book in the midst of the obsessions and abstraction of folks
seeking comfort in Web 2.0. Beautifully written too."

Chris Schroeder, former CEO, WashingtonPost/Newsweek online and CEO, Health
Central Network

"Important....will spur some very constructive debate. This is a book that
can produce positive changes to the current inertia of web 2.0."

Martin Green, VP of Community, CNET

"For anyone who thinks that technology alone will make for a better
democracy, Andrew Keen will make them think twice"

Andrew Rasiej, Founder, Personal Democracy Forum

"Very engaging, and quite controversial and provocative. He doesn't hold
back any punches."

Dan Farber, editor-in-chief, ZDNet

"Andrew Keen is a brilliant, witty, classically-educated technoscold--and
thank goodness. The world needs an intellectual Goliath to slay Web 2.0's
army of Davids."

Jonathan Last, Online Editor, The Weekly Standard

In today's self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and
anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a
video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between
trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When
anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional
standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate
public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and
reinvented.
Our "cut-and-paste" online culture--in which intellectual property is
freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated--threatens over 200
years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing
artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the
fruits of their creative labours. Further, advertising revenue is being
siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television
networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube
and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the
multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie
industry.
The very anonymity that Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability
of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual
predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite--Keen
pioneered several Internet startups himself--he urges us to consider the
consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and
piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative
institutions.

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The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand by Chris Anderson  (9)  £6.29

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott  (9)  £10.19

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger  (2)  £11.07

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky  (3)  £10.95

We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity by Charles Leadbeater  (2)  £9.09

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15 Reviews 5 star:    (0) 4 star:  (4) 3 star:  (2) 2 star:  (1) 1 star:  (8)           Average Customer Review (15 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews   46 of 51 people found the following review helpful: Bit of a damp squib, 14 Jun 2007 By  J. B. Rivett-Carnac (Surrey, UK) - See all my reviews    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.  Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   25 of 28 people found the following review helpful: Brilliant example of internet marketing... dreadful book, 9 Aug 2007 By  Peter Tiarks "Uncle Petie" - See all my reviews    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.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   11 of 13 people found the following review helpful: Confused, prurient, and amateur - a debate is needed, but this isn't the book to lead it., 24 Jul 2007 By  Mr. O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews       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 empassioned, 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