The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy [Paperback]

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.

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.

This book is a pamphlet. So do not expect any deep "truth" or reflection. It is extremely superficial and only reactive to a reality the author does not like. Yet it is not all bad nor all good. His defense of intellectual property is interesting and it is a must of the next twenty years. Unluckily the copyright system does not protect the intellectual property and patrimonial rights of the author of the work of art under consideration but only the copyright of the proprietor of the commercial product derived from the work of art itself. Yes the survival of artists is at stake. No the copyright is not there to encourage artistic creation as some like Dean Baker would contend but to remunerate the artist for his work. It is not an encouragement but an income. So far Keen is right. But he at once gets off the tracks because he considers that only those who are recognized as professionals are entitled to this copyright and the protection that is coming along with it. Who is to decide who is going to be a professional artist? And here Keen is absolutely and fanatically clear: professionals are recognized by already recognized professional, hence the establishment and the snake bites its tail, its very long tail indeed. If for a journalist to be professional he has to have a job in one major newspaper, then who chooses these recognized journalists in these recognized major newspapers? Keen does not see the vicious circle. If a research worker can only be professional if he is a member of a recognized academic institution, then millions of research workers of value are just rejected. Keen does not see that innovation can only come, and I insist CAN ONLY COME, from people who are outside the establishment or marginal in the establishment. If Mozart had only done what he was asked to do, he could never have produced his most important masterpieces that were rejected by the establishment of his time. Keen forget that the average level of the elite depends on the average level of the masses. The elite of a slavery system cannot think the full democracy of citizens absolutely equal in rights since for them it is nothing but natural to have unequal beings, some, the minority, having citizen rights and the others, the majority, having no rights at all. Calhoun and his democracy based on the right for the minority (understand the salve-owners) to block any decision of the majority is pathetic but absurd. Plato and Socrates' democratic Republic is a sham because it does not state and envisage the freedom of everyone and equal rights for everyone. An invention in a society is always the answer to a problem the society can afford to consider. Many problems are not considered by all societies if these problems are beyond the various societies' scopes, hence unthinkable for these societies, and the scope of a society is what a society as a whole and what each member of that society as an average, can imagine, conceive, think, envisage, conceptualize. Maybe Wikipedia is not "scientific" and has to be cross-examined in all the data it provides, yet the Internet is providing everyone today with a possible enormous mass of information and because no one will accept to drown in this information, they will all learn, at times by their own means, to swim, that is to say cross examine the information they get, which should eventually develop the critical power of everyone. And here Keen calls for all kinds of restrictive measures. He is wrong. Intellectual property will be best defended and enhanced in courts just like private property real estate. He is wrong too because the main responsibility in that field is in the hands of everyone, particularly teachers, professors and other educators. Never ever ever ask a student a factual question any more since they can get the answer in seconds on the Internet. Always, absolutely always ask for arguments, contradictory arguments, pros and cons. Refuse the concept of truth, unique, sole, exclusive and detained by some kind of aristocracy whose minds are in the shape of shielded safes. Today the priority objective of all education is to teach and teach and teach that there is NO unique truth but only relative points of view that we have to collect and confront. Teaching is confronting points of view. Learning is articulating opposite points of view into sensible and rational presentations that you cannot find fully fledged and finished on the Internet because truth is elusive and no one will ever reach it in any historical time. Then to make his point all the more un-escapable, Keen mixes up the circulation of data and information, the piracy of some as for music and videos, sexual predators, sexual morality, gambling, etc. Then the pamphlet turns sour. It is the market of social experience that will prove ideas and idea-holders true or false, in fact effective or ineffective. All that produces some added value will be recognized as valuable. The rest will be discarded. No decision of any well-groomed expert can replace this free circulation and confrontation of multiple points of view.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines