The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture

I am at once sympathetic to and turned off by this book. You have to appreciate it for its courage and, simultaneously, take some of its hysteria with a pinch of salt. Its main weakness is shared with most debates about media in general: much of the discussion that centers on television, radio, film and the Internet is framed as a discussion of the medium when it is really about the content. I do not believe, as both Mr. Keen and his enemies in the "digital mob" appear to accept uncritically, that the "medium is the message." Any idealization of pre-Internet mass media is as misinformed as the cultural critics who decried the death of the book in the heyday of television. Or the low-rent Utopians who expect the Web 2.0 to bring forth Jerusalem. The printing press itself is more or less neutral depending upon the social context in which you place it. It can both serve to propagate Galileo's Dialogues as Mein Kampf. YouTube can broadcast both the speeches of Martin Luther King and cats playing pianos. More precisely, the medium can be molded according to the objectives of the people who use them, which is the point the author makes toward the end. In any case, this book is well worth reading, since it is a refreshing balance to manifestos like Chris Anderson's "Free" and the entire "Wired" ideology, which are in dire need of some kind of skeptic counterpoint. Read this along with Jaron Lanier's "Your Are not a Gadget," which argues along similar lines.

This book is closer to 5 stars than 1. I don't just measure a book by how much I agree with it. I actually disagreed with the author on many of his points (see other reviews for details) but the one thing I could not do was stop reading, stop thinking, look things up, and go off and think some more. What more can you ask for while reading a book? I highly recommend it and rank it 5 stars in order to help properly balance the overall rating closer to 4. I challenge you to get a hold of this book, read it, and start thinking about the true impact of the Internet (blogs, wikis, reviews like this) on our culture.

This is one of the most optimistic and uplifting books I have read in a long time. I read the chapter on how talented amateurs writers and musicians can now succeed without the permission of the "big labels" and I said YAY! I read the chapter on how we can read the eyewitness reports of "common" citizen journalists rather than "professional" media sorces who report and tilt stories to reflect their own (or their employers') world view and I said YAY! I read the chapter on how everyone with a computer can now share their own opinion and product with the world and I said YAY! The feared consequences for our society voiced in this book are exactly the changes many readers may feel are long overdue and would love to see come to pass on a larger and more transformative scale. Once upon a time, there was very little media at all in our country and the choices were very limited. There were only three television stations and all were owned by people who shared similar opinions, agendas and points of view. There was only one newspaper per city or town and, generally, only "professional" journalists were permitted to write news accounts or editorials there. The media was an exclusive private club and monopoly and they largely viewed their audience as, in Mr. Keen's words, "dim-witted, uneducated, untalented monkeys" who were desperately in need of their wisdom and guidence to what they felt would be a better world. As the Internet becomes widespread, the "monkeys" are attaining equal status and the illusion of intellectual superiority by the "ptofessionals" is no more. That is why digital media is so frightening to the conventional media and why they are so vocally opposed to it and it's "effects on society." I highly recommend this book to anyone who disagrees with Mr. Keen's opinions. It is both an enlightening look into his position and a powerful endorsement of the opposing one. Plus, it's a good read for any young person with a blog or Myspace of their own. They will learn a lesson about how the media selling them their favorite books, movies and CDs really see them.

...I'm very glad Keen wrote it. I find much of what he writes (very well, I might add) to be irritatingly forced perspective, and I get irate at almost every turn of the page. But that's why I appreciate the book so much, and think it's so important. It's forcing me to think and feel about the internet in ways I haven't. While I don't subscribe to Keen's alarmist point of view (and find many of his arguments overly simplistic), I don't completely reject the Trojan Horse nature of Web 2.0, and I applaud him for putting the issue on the table. I think this is a very important subject, and even if one doesn't agree point-for-point with the author, one must concede that the subject demands attention and discourse. I'd like very much to yell across the dinner table (or Web 2.0, if he so chose) with Mr. Keen about his book.

This is a brilliant work of provocation that fulfills the author's gadfly intentions. Viewed as a sustained, rational argument, however, the book is less successful. On my reading, the book advances three general arguments--two of which are silly and wrong; and one of which is profound and important. The three arguments, as I see them, are these: (i) blogs are the work of amateurs and undermine the mainstream media(MSM); (ii) Web 2.0 is parasitic on the work of content-providers--typically private corporations--which it threatens to ruin economically; and (iii) Web 2.0 destroys the very idea of a character-forming high culture. I think arguments (i) and (ii) are wrong; but argument (iii) is close enough to being right that it warrants careful scrutiny. Argument (i) is completely offbase, not least because blogs are not always the work of amateurs and not always inferior to the work of the MSM. For instance, some of the best blogs are written by academic experts--Brad DeLong on Economics, Joshua Marshall and associates on US domestic policy, and Juan Cole on Iraq. These blogs have, in my view, done a much better job of exposing the incompetence of the Bush administration than the MSM. Some of the better blogs (EU Referendum, for instance)have done an excellent job of covering issues not reported well by the MSM--defense procurement decisions, for instance--and exposing incompetence and ignorance in the work of the MSM. Argument (ii) is even more wildly offbase. Keen seems to think that any "good" offered for free (or at substantially lower costs) that destroys the profits of a company that charged for that "good" entails a net loss to the economy. But this is clearly not the case. The money that consumers save on the free "good" can be spent on some other "good." Furthermore, in the case of the internet, the free "good"--e.g. the Google search engine--was superior to other comparable "goods," whether free or not. Ultimately, what matters is whether technological change leads to societal "wealth"--measured in the classical economists' sense of "the necessaries and conveniences of life." The story of western economic development is a story of the growth of this form of "wealth." The horse-drawn stagecoach gives way to the car; the pony-express gives way to the telegraph; and economic research firms give way to Google. Doubtless, it's a bummer if you are a stagecoach driver, a blacksmith, or an economic factgatherer, but that's no reason for societies to embrace the doctrine of the Luddites. Keen's third argument about the consequences of Web 2.0 on, what might be termed, "high culture" is the important one. Here Keen is onto something of great significance. Simply put, we rely on a high culture to form a civilized society and to tame (in conjunction with the criminal law) our most destructive dispositions. For a long time now--certainly since Tocqueville and Mill in the nineteenth century--intellectuals have worried about the cu