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 | 
| Author: Andrew Keen
Publisher: Doubleday Business
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  102 reviews
Sales Rank: 57409
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
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 (New: Last 30 Days)
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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 97 more reviews...
 Good Style and Dubious Content September 3, 2008
Keen's argument--that the Web 2.0 is driven by a Marxist and radical 1960s counter culture ideology and is doomed by these ideologies' shortcomings--is bogus and impossible to support with any empirical evidence. People who are driving Web 2.0 are not ideologues, as Keen would have us believe, but entrepreneurs. In other words, they want to make money.
However, Keen would like to equate the millions of blogs that are born from Web 2.0 with Marxism in order to push his own conservative worldview. In logic, we call this Procrustean thinking, forcing an argument to fit your worldview.
No one said that most blogs are good. A few will rise to the top and we will have to struggle to find the good ones. That's a fair point. But to say that the dumbed down blogs are driven from Marxism and counter cultural ideas from the 1960s is laughable.
What's ironic is that Keen talks about the "Great Seduction" of blogs but the real not so great "seduction" is his fine prose style collapsing under the weight of his Procrustean thinking.
 Give some credit to the "user" August 26, 2008
Mr. Keen's book assumes that proponents of Web 2.0 desire the end of traditional media. Not correct. They are a part of the "new" Internet.
Finally, Mr. Keen does not give any credit to the reader of "Web 2.0" information. Yes, we see a lot of trash on the Net. However, we weed it out and read only the valuable information. And, there's a lot of it. In fact, too much.
No doubt, we need to be better editors -- in real-time and better writers.
Our culture could use a good killing. August 23, 2008
Once, I read an article bemoaning the closure of the many seaside amusement parks that dotted American coastlines for almost a century until the early 1900s. It reminded me how much I hate cotten candy. Even though jobs were lost and costal towns were left with acres of industrial wreckage and abandoned piers to bargain with, I'm not too bothered that my kids aren't begging me to take them there.
This treatment on the effects of "Web 2.0" on our culture is kind of like that. The record industry and their well funded lobbying group loves to rave about the detrimental effects of music piracy. The author makes enough tenderly worded epitaphs to satisfy them all, but I'd rather listen to Radioheads internet-released "In Rainbows" than spend any more time throwing money at those clowns. Bob Dylan knew the times were a-changing 40 years ago. "Admit that the waters around you have grown, and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone," and don't waste any time with this one.
 Ironically a blog-lie rant, fine but uneffective August 17, 2008
Cheap and fast read, an interesting opinion, probably worth the cost just to balance the views of so many other recent books, BUT...
This book would have been hundreds of times better with consistently good references. Maybe even footnotes! (to be fair, there is a very short section of end note/bibliography-like references) I tend to agree with the general idea, so was hoping he had some real fard facts to back up this opinion. That seems like one important role of books, and why they differ from blog entries.
Ironically, this is very similar to what the author complains is missing from web 2.0. People are posting a lot of self-absorbed opinions, and see no reason to back them up.
About the first half of the book are anecdotal or nostangic ravings. The next fourth are some well researched facts. Then he goes back to his soap box. His best substantiated point is not the demoralizing of culture, but the fact that the web (especially web 2.0) wins our dollars against physical world competitors. However, the web doesn't generate anything close in jobs and money. A concreter point. And insightful.
The same complaints, that technology is demoralizing us, have been made over and over. Social historians like Jerome Kern actually sift through the evidence. And then come to a supported opinion, not based on moral assumptions and projections about how the world _should_ be. Agree or not with the conclusion, but it hurts the argument when we don't know precisely how an author arrives at a conclusion.
It is all too easy to blame annoying Utopic wide-eyed kids. Fine, but then the responsibility is to show us if that's a resulting illusion of the author's life in the face of these paradigm shifts or are there actual studies to show it is not personal. There are even authors like Sheldrake who say up front "there isn't much proof out there" and begs us to do more proper studies. Fact finding requires work to sift through the noise, which is something the author claims is missing and inferior in blogs.
He is sadly (and paranoiacally like many of us) mistaken about the tech. Cookies don't work anything like he describes. How would he realistically propose sites enforce "stricter age verification"? Ignorance regularly breeds fear. The author appears not to appreciate Stanley Milgram, Erik Hoffer or Irving Goffman studies about group-think and why smart people still do bad things. A pre-web book "When Old Technologies Were New" is actually a much more insightful investigation of web 2.0. I agree that Social Networking is downright anti-social. But we can skip the moralizing lecture. Perhaps venting is all the web need be for.
Hopefully, this review will convince both the Utopia dreamers of the brave new web and the crusty, stubborn old set-in-their-ways folks to look past their gut impressions (not that they aren't valid, but only half the battle) for overwhelming concrete evidence (and not a few isolated out-of-context anecdotes) to substantiate the claims.
Horrible Book June 4, 2008
This book is a strong candidate for the worst book I've ever read. So why two stars?
The reason I award it two stars is that the author does a wonderful job of refuting his own major thesis, namely his claim that professionals and experts write better books, articles, etc. --- produce better music, and so on --- than amateurs. Apparently not, judging by this sorry attempt.
The book is full of fallacious arguments, wrong economic theory, very inconsistent political theory, and worse just as other "negative" reviewers have described. Very briefly:
He stridently compares what he regards as the best of traditional media with what he regards as the worst of the Internet. He appears to view a "job" once obtained as an entitlement. He claims that we need "experts" to explain everything to us because we are incapable of properly figuring anything out for ourselves. He repeatedly displays the same class snobbery that has caused so much trouble in other countries over the years --- for example, he writes as though anyone with "credentials" knows more about a subject than everyone who doesn't. He argues that Frito-Lay's holding an ad competition and not spending money on traditional advertising as having "sucked money out of the economy." He pleads with the reader to support traditional journalists rather than those that publish on the Internet. He appears to be ignorant of the history of the press (e.g. doesn't seem to know anything about Pulitzer or Hearst) and is either grossly ignorant of the political dimensions of the press or completely blind to them like many journalists. He bemoans the bankruptcy of those brick-and-mortar stores of which he has such fond memories --- more of a personal problem than something for which I should have to pick up the tab.
I'm not a big fan of the Internet myself, having called it "The Misinformation Highway" and claiming that it's proportion of garbage is even higher than that of television. But in attempting to make the same points, this author has actually done a disservice to the traditional media by publishing this horrible book.
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