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Andrew Keen

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy Paperback – 5 Jun. 2007

by Andrew Keen (Author)

3.4 40 ratings

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Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show! Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today's new digital media in this lively, readable and witty polemic, which reveals how an avalanche of amateur content is threatening our values, economy, and ultimately innovation and creativity itself. Highly topical, provocative and controversial - the counter-argument to "The Long Tail", "The Wisdom of Crowds" and the 'mad utopians' of Web 2.0, it is a wake-up call offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in this assault. Our most valued cultural institutions - our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies - are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. 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.

Print length

240 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Nicholas Brealey Publishing
Publication date

5 Jun. 2007
ISBN-10

1857883934
ISBN-13

978-1857883930
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Product description

Review

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

About the Author

Andrew Keen hosts the acclaimed podcast show, AfterTV, and his views have generated a firestorm of interest.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Nicholas Brealey Publishing (5 Jun. 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1857883934
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1857883930

Customer reviews:
3.4 40 ratings

About the author

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Andrew Keen

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Andrew Keen is an Internet entrepreneur who founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet company. He is currently the executive director of the Silicon Valley salon FutureCast, a Senior Fellow at CALinnovates, the host of the “Keen On” Techonomy chat show, and a columnist for CNN.

He is the author of three books: CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How The Internet Is Killing Our Culture (2007), DIGITAL VERTIGO: How Today’s Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing and Disorienting Us (2012) and INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER (2015).

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Richmond

Raises some interesting issues

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 3 August 2007

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This isn't a bad book - maybe a little thin, and superficial. It covers the rise of Web 2 / user generated content, and looks at the perils of having so many poorly informed people masquerading as informed experts. The author's observations on Wikipedia, and the potential problems with content are correct. He covers the music industry, and how a new generation of younger people have no concept of ownership or intellectual rights. I can see his point.

My criticism of the book is that while his points are valid, he doesn't offer many remedies until the final chapter, and most of them aren't very convincing. I get the feeling the author would thoroughly disapprove of me giving this review. I'd be considered too amateur to fully appreciate and properly review his book. He's probably right.

I have some respect for him, because he's sticking his neck out by highlighting the pitfalls of Web 2, while everyone is falling over themselves to talk it up and suggest that the democratization of the Internet (and information in general) is the best thing ever.

I'd recommend reading the book. It won't take you too long.

15 people found this helpful

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Olly Buxton

Confused, prurient, and amateur - a debate is needed, but this isn't the book to lead it.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 24 July 2007

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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

42 people found this helpful

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Boffin

A critical view on Web 2.0

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 17 December 2018

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Web 2.0 (and now Web 3.0) has garnered considerable interest and enthusiasm in a wide range of scientific fields. However, critical assessment of the evolution of the internet and its didactic/epistemological implications is proportionally underrepresented. Keen gives a concise summary of Web 2.0's development and the problems following in its wake. The book is not exhaustive on the subject, but an adequate primer for further research.

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A. P. Crooks

A considerable let-down

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 3 July 2007

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I confess that this book was a disappointment to me.

I bought it expecting a lively and above all informed debate on the impact of Web 2.0 upon society and culture, but my impression is of a rather frantic and thin diatribe which tries to force through its somewhat confused arguments by the mere weigh of examples. We are accordingly told of the demise of CD and DVD sales, of newspapers, books and `quality' journalism due to Web 2.0 via hundreds of cited instances. Woven into this meandering tour of the woeful loss of traditional ways are dozens of seemingly innocent but potentially misleading generalisations. Keen states for example that `young people are simply not listening to radio anymore', but the actual statistics he cites in the next sentence make clear that whilst there has been a decline, his initial assertion is just plain wrong.

His comments on Wikipedia appear to be particularly vehement, and again, in my view, take an extreme position. Any user of Wiki will know the pains they are taking to have stated facts cited by authoritative sources. Admittedly this requirement only came into force in January 2007, but perhaps Keen should place more faith in the Web 2.0 exponents, and indeed in the amateur, who I cannot believe are all the wicked perverters of truth that this writer's book might suggest.

The Cult of the Amateur, in my opinion, sometimes peddles the very `dumbed down' style and slanted polemic that the author is so at pains to denigrate. Certainly, Web 2.0 is changing the way we live and communicate, and issues of piracy and plagiarism need to be addressed, but these are not themselves products of the internet. I sensed in the writing a disturbing intellectual fundamentalism which does little more, in the last analysis, than to hanker for `the good olds days' if ever they were so. My impression is that Keen holds that if news, fiction, music etc. is generated in a conventional way by `professionals' then it is innately of higher quality than its internet-based counterpart. A more high-handed and pompous position would be hard to find.

The Web 2.0 debate needs to be had, but this book, in my view, does not throw much light on it.

I understand that by adding this review I am myself contributing to what Keen calls the `cult of the amateur' but I do not feel compelled to accept his writings without question simply because they arrive in printed form with an ISBN number.

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