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Thought-provoking, but lacks some essential logic Jul 6, 2007 (124 of 142 found this helpful)
Because I work in traditional media (book and magazine publishing) and regret how magazine and newspaper publishing are being decimated by competition from cheap (and free) Internet ad sales, I thought I'd like this book more than I did. Particularly since I agree with its premise that the vast majority of the free content on the Internet that is not supplied by traditional publishers is of less-than-professional quality. And that the Internet is home to a great deal of junk information, narcissistic self-expression, childish insults (the number of people who are 45 going on 13 is astounding, as is the number of the quasi-literate), slander, and scams.
However, although _The Cult of the Amateur_ is highly thought provoking, it is marred by sloppy thinking. For one thing: "Amateur" is never defined. Professionalism is a complicated concept in the fields of literature, music, visual arts, and dance (the last is a field this book does not cover, but it is one I am familiar with as a performer and teacher). Professionalism is often not defined by whether the person makes his or her living as a writer, musician, etc. Most people in most arts fields, including some highly skilled and well-known artists, simply cannot earn a living working in the arts full time because the pay is typically too low. Professionalism is sometimes defined by whether the artist has passed "gatekeepers," in the form of publishers or producers, or by winning contests. On the other hand, in the fields of live music and dance performance, this is often not valid, as the hiring parties often do not know enough technically to know whether the performers are any good. I have heard professionalism defined as whether the artist continually strives to achieve his or her best--and then studies and works to improve even more. That would have been a good definition for this book to adopt.
But even the book's implied definition of professionalism, which is the passing of gatekeepers, is not consistent. For example, the book discusses how some amateurs were recruited by major companies via contests to create advertising material for those companies. The winners were paid, more than a pittance though less than seasoned pros--which seems reasonable enough, since beginners in a field are usually paid less. Instead of viewing this as a situation where some beginners gained a toehold in the field of professional advertising and a credit to put on the resume when applying for advertising jobs, the book laments it as professional opportunities and money being thrown away on rank amateurs. But: The contest winners did pass the gatekeepers.
The book fails to address another aspect of the Internet that degrades the quality of the publications on it: The Internet heavily rewards change. The ethos is that change is inherently good, and frequent change means a much higher search engine rank. And many people are blogging, or providing free informational articles, to promote their businesses. (Another aspect of the Internet this book does not address: It assumes everyone except big businesses blogs, posts, and chats on e-lists out of sheer narcissism.) Not infrequently these promotional bloggers or site owners are professional writers who have passed "gatekeepers" elsewhere.
But: If they were writing for traditional book and magazine publishers, together with the publisher they would _finish_ each work and perfect it as far as humanly possible. Every monthly issue of a magazine is a different, polished publication. Even the most frequently updated books, such as directories, are only published annually. But the work on a website is supposed to be never done--meaning many of the best writer/website owners post half-finished work and fluff just to keep up their search engine rank. Others constantly chase people to write free "guest" articles--so the website owners can get on with their real writing work. The least scrupulous website
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Confused, Prurient and Amateur: A debate is needed, but this isn't the book to lead it Jul 24, 2007 (231 of 270 found this helpful)
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 empassioned, 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, irri
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A Missed Opportunity to Explore a Downside of the Internet Phenomenon Aug 4, 2007 (27 of 32 found this helpful)
What begins as a moderately intriguing if vague conjecture, elevates to a jeremiad against unchecked amateurism, rampant plagiarism, indifference to intellectual property rights, and the threatened extinction of professionally mediated information, escalates further into a tirade against online pornography, gambling, and video games, finally ends as a flailing, Orwell-invoking, anti-Google rant against privacy invasion. In fact, this book review on Amazon, written by someone who is not a "trained professional" reviewer, has no right even to exist. Thus speaketh one Andrew Keen in THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR. Yet how an exploration of the rise of blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube, and other amateur sources of information and culture can end in a moralistic scolding over online pornography and gaming rather escapes me. Regrettably, this book turns a potentially interesting discourse on a particularly problematic aspect of the Internet into an easily dismissed, faintly evangelical sermon ("...the moral fabric of our society is being unraveled by Web 2.0") that falls just short of mimicking the very blogs to which it so strenuously objects.
Not that Mr. Keen is without street cred as a Silicon Valley insider - he was the founder and CEO of audiocafe.com. Not that his book is without a viable premise, either. Mr. Keen's primary points, offered in his early chapters, are arguable but well taken. He asserts that the Internet has democratized information to such an extent that amateur opinion has become a substitute for vetted fact. Far too often, he claims, bloggers merely synthesize and regurgitate information collected from the investigative work of traditional media or else rework it as disguised opinion. Worse, too many young people do not appreciate the difference, failing to understand (or simply not caring) that much Internet content has never been reviewed or refereed by other professionals in the subject area. Keen then extends this point beyond blogs and Wikipedia to the uncontrolled proliferation of junk culture - mindless YouTube videos, mind-numbing garage band music, and mind-boggling trivia.
Contrary to several other reviewers' critiques, Keen is not so much extolling the virtues of the professional over the amateur as he is decrying the implications of turning the Internet into a cultural wasteland and intellectual property free-for-all zone. He sees the Web 2.0 downside as decimation of the music and book retailing businesses, potential stifling of creativity by failing to reward originators for their work, and undercutting of traditional journalism with its associated investigative and field work (the raw material, Keen argues, for much of the blogosphere). I do not believe he is rejecting all "amateur" work so much as lamenting its uncontrolled growth. How to find a worthwhile needle in such as massive haystack of dreck?
These points are debatable, but that in itself is the point - they should be debated. Unfortunately, Mr. Keen offers no original or in-depth research to support his arguments, relying instead on occasional statistics drawn from such sources as Business Week, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal. However, simply claiming that there are X-million YouTube or Facebook sites or blogs does not in itself mean that the amateur Internet is flourishing at the expense of something else (except perhaps outdoor exercise time). Similarly, claims that the Internet is subverting mainstream media channels hardly seem legitimate (in fact, seem downright laughable) when the only example concerns misinformation about Barack Obama from a Unification Church print source that ostensibly polluted Fox News and conservative talk radio, both so notable for their pollution-free content. By the same token, Keen's later rants against unauthorized music downloading conveniently ignore the many years in which fans copied music to their own mix tapes, jus
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Speaking of amateurs Apr 8, 2008 (12 of 13 found this helpful)
Mr. Keen makes some interesting points that deserve our critical attention, namely that free content, whether produced by amateurs or not, seems to be leading to a major crisis for industries that rely on the controled creation and distribution of information or creative material. They're losing money. I think most of us who are paying attention know this and we haven't found out what to do about it... yet.
That being said, I found myself dismissing most of his arguements regarding the degradation our culture because of the self-broadcasting possiblilities of the internet. First of all, his tone is horrid. He seems to have no faith in his fellow man at all, unless he holds a PhD or some other impressive credentials. He assumes that because there is a lot of mediocre material on the web, that it is all "for idiots, by idiots".
He doesn't give any of us credit for becoming increasingly savvy about the media we consume. He doesn't understand that we are raising a generation of children who have an extraordinary talent for finding the needles in the haystack of the web. I personally believe that interaction with Web 2.0 enhances our ability to filter information and screen for what we need or want. Sure it's easy to waste time on YouTube, but you're more likely to find interesting content there than on television, where "expert" producers have been feeding us banal trash for years (hello, Jackass? Reality TV show #45,000? Fox News?) I've got 400 channels on my cable, and on any given day there may be two programs I actually would waste my time watching. On YouTube, I can pull up the lastest Electorial candidate debates, or find news clips of Dick Cheney contradicting himself... or cute pandas... but I have a greater measure of control over what I find.
He totally discounts the argument that mainstream media, particularly news media, leave out marginalized voices. He even claims that political bias in mainstream newspapers and magazines are relegated to the editorial pages because there are professional editors in place. Is he kidding? Really? Does anybody really believe that?
It's funny to me that, in his cynicism, he ignores some of the really incredible things that can come out of "democratized" access to creative endevors. A great example came out this past year, when NASA put out a design challenge on their website- they offered $200,000 for the best solution to building a better space glove. The winning entry came from an unemployed engineer who worked on the project in his garage. NASA will be manufacturing his rather elegant design, and got their better space glove for a fraction of what it would have cost to develop it through the regular channels. And aparently NASA got the idea from a blogger! Taking this anecdote and spreading it out, it shows that given the enormous power of free-flowing information, we can tap the under-utilized talents that lay latent in the general populace. We can defintely benefit from better communication. Yes, that does mean that we need to turn a critical eye to what we read/see on the internet, and take a particularly skeptical view of user-generated content, but that doesn't mean that that content can't be very, very useful.
The irony is that as much as he seems to abhor amateur on the internet, Keen himself seems poorly qualified to discuss larger cultural ramifications of the participatory nature of Web 2.0. His bio says he's a Silacon Valley entrepreur, but that hardly qualifies him to write this essay. Sure he's probably witnessed a lot of crap out there, but his analysis is, well, lame. He likes to throw around words like "authorship", "mystery", "sanctity", and "truth" as if Post-modernism hadn't ever happened. For a man who made his money in the internet revolution, he sure doesn't seem to be living in the same bloggosphere I am.
Good thing I borrowed this from the library.
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Hyperbolic and misleading Sep 26, 2007 (15 of 18 found this helpful)
The Cult of the Amateur argues that blogs and social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube are destroying America's culture. These interactive technologies and the trends they enable are, to use Andrew Keen's words, scary, horrible, ominous, grave, chilling, disturbing, threatening, and nightmarish.
A frequent contributor to William Kristol's Weekly Standard magazine, Keen posits an edenic world where not long ago "our collective intellectual history was driven by the careful aggregation of truth--through professionally edited books and reference materials, newspapers, and radio and television." But now, he says, the Internet has infected our culture with mistakes and fraud.
Keen does make valid points along the way. A couple of them:
* It's important to be able to distinguish between credible and worthless sources of information.
* Parents and teachers should educate kids about dangers on the Internet. Parents should set browser filters and should place their computers in a family room, rather than in the kid's bedroom.
But his valid points are embedded among off-topic rants and weepy sympathy for media giants like the Disney Company and Time Warner.
And sounding at times like a Bible-waving evangelist, Keen claims that America's moral fabric is unraveling because of blogs, wikis, and social networking sites: "The Web 2.0 seduces us into acting on our most deviant instincts and allows us to succumb to our most destructive vices. It is corroding and corrupting the values we share as a nation." In other words, Keen uses hyperbole and misleading statements to argue that the Internet/Web 2.0 is bad because it's full of hyperbole and misleading statements.