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

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
preda