The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values | 
 enlarge | Author: Andrew Keen
Publisher: Doubleday Business
Category: Book
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Rating:  104 reviews
Sales Rank: 124023
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0385520816
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9780385520812
Publication Date: August 12, 2008
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Product Description
Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show
In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.
Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. 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. Worse, Keen claims, 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 labors.
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.
The very anonymity that the 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.
Offering concrete solutions on how we can rein in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 99 more reviews...
 Thought provoking. May 21, 2008
L. Figueroa (New Jersey)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
I disagree with most of the book, but... June 26, 2007
M. Colin
14 out of 18 found this review helpful
...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.
Web 2.0, Culture, and Civilization June 17, 2007
Glyn Morgan
18 out of 25 found this review helpful
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 cultural consequences of a mass, democratized society. These worries were premature. We found ways of retaining a high culture even in the new democratic era. We cannot underestimate here the role played by national broadcasting corporations (the BBC, NHK, CBC, PBS, etc) that saw their role to inform and educate and not merely to entertain. But now we must worry anew about the prospects of a new culture formed by individuals and groups each with their own access to broadcasting (or narrow-casting) technology. It is not clear that in this new world, we can rely upon culture to elevate our characters and tame harmful dispositions. Keen is clearly onto something important here. This argument needs to be taken up and debated. Reviewers who focus on arguments (i) and (ii) miss the real importance of this book.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I've known Andrew Keen for years and have always enjoyed disagreeing with him.
Very telling January 8, 2008
Julie Waid (Littleton, Colorado)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
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.
Egalitarianism Swamping Elitism June 12, 2007
Stanley H. Nemeth (Garden Grove, CA United States)
16 out of 25 found this review helpful
"The Cult of the Amateur" is one of those books which calls into question the unreflective rah-rahing over certain recent technological advances (Internet 2.0) and the ignoring of the losses to society and culture such gains in fact entail. No Luddite, Andrew Keen is fully savvy as to the value of the internet, but he rightly points out its subversive side: the disparagement of the expert and the elevation of the untutored to unwarranted prominence. His book is a welcome, updated companion to the late William Henry's 1994 volume, "In Defense of Elitism." Like Henry, Keen sees that the necessary balance in America between egalitarian forces and elitist ones is way out of whack, with the push so far in the egalitarian direction that serious considerations of truth, real goodness, and genuine beauty are routinely dismissed as invidious, suggesting, as they do, the uncomforting idea that nature has not distributed insights, talents and abilities democratically.
If Keen's book has flaws, I would say they are two. First of all, as an earlier reviewer pointed out, to emphasize the indisputable vulgarity of the internet rumor mill, Keen overrates the current probity of formerly highly reputable newspapers. The days when one could assume the front pages of the major ones gave a reader all the news that was fit to print and not just the news that fits are long since gone. In addition, staff writers across the nation can often be found editorializing on the front pages, whereas in former times opinion was more strictly confined to the appropriate locations. Perhaps such staffers have themselves been influenced by blogging practices.
Second, Keen forecasts, with the usurpation of experts, a world of amateurs, all of equal and thus individually minimal clout. But elitism forced out the front door will reenter at the back. One need look no further than the current website, for instance, to see that certain book reviewers here form cliques and indulge in the narcissism of receiving large numbers of bloc votes, no matter the item reviewed, suggesting that the expert will be replaced not by ignorant masses, but even more frightening, by a new elite of ignorant American idol types.
Nevertheless, Keen's book is one of contrarian prophecy, and its essential thesis is so right on that these flaws in application consequently pale in importance.
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