Geek Reads, Summer 2007.3: The Cult of the Amateur

This article was originally posted on September 20, 2007.

Andrew Keen, in his book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Our Culture” has taken an unpopular position, at least (certainly!) among the “digiterati,” and made an interesting case for it. In this book, he tells us how the “New Media” of the Web are, in his words, “killing our culture.” As user-contributed, free content proliferates, expertise is devalued and media and culture are reduced to a mass-market least common denominator, eroding valued cultural institutions that have taken several decades to form.

Think about the following examples, some of the many he discusses:

While Keen is a compelling storyteller and richly illustrates the problems, I found the degree to which he indicts tools, media, and entire markets for individuals’ misbehavior off-putting after a while. There are systemic problems with today’s media and Internet that need fixing: protection of minors, privacy, and intellectual property, and I felt that Keen spent too little time drilling down on potential solutions and too much lamenting, for example, the demise of the local record store with the quirky but good-hearted clerk willing to make just the right recommendation.

Andrew Keen has been writing and speaking on this topic much as Nicholas Carr has done with “IT Doesn’t Matter,” and, although it shouldn’t be surprising, I must admit that I giggled a bit when I learned that Keen, philosophically opposed to such user-contributed content and vanity projects, has a (to his, credit, interesting) blog. Cult of the Amateur is a thought-provoking and lively read, and on one very base level, it makes me want to see Keen and James Surowiecki in a steel-cage match to see whose cultural paradigm reigns supreme.

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.