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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)

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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 details

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

Best Sellers Rank: 4,998,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 9,013 in Managers' Guides to Computing
- 12,478 in E-Business
- 50,295 in Cultural Studies

Customer reviews:
38 ratings

Product description

Review

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

Synopsis

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.

5 star		36%
4 star		16%
3 star		10%
2 star		15%
1 star		23%

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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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S. A. 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

Helpful

Nicely written nonsense

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 November 2009

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There seems to be a relationship between how well authors write and their general ignorance of the subject and this book is a case in point. I read it directly after reading Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which I found difficult to get into. By comparison the style of writing is much better, but then again he is writing a polemic and so it is written very much from a rhetorical stand-point.

What comes through are the views of a failed dot.com bubble, music entrepreneur with a smattering of philosophical education and a distinct lack of economic understanding. If people do not pay for advertising that money does not go out of the economy it is just spent on something else. The losers are those who stick to selling what people no longer want like candle-makers. Music died because the publishers and distributors failed to understand the market.

He also does not understand the reasoning behind Intellectual Property and his arguments about people being cheated out of their just rewards. I am a scientist and I make my living out of ideas but I never could make money out of the copyright of those ideas. Within my community it is an obligation to GIVE them away for free and to waive our rights to copyright. From my perspective why should artists be treated differently there is no difference in the level of creative input. Our culture will survive Web 2.0. There will be problems and winners and losers, but the losers are those who cannot see how to become winners and it is not the fault of Web 2.0 itself.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

A fearmongering pamphlet is no conceptual thought

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 October 2007

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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

10 people found this helpful

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