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

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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 owners and bloggers (these are not, I sincerely hope, professional writers), merely lift material from other sites: The ethos of change is yet another incentive to violate copyright.

The book also displays no historical sense beyond a few years ago. (When I first saw the subtitle, my snide thought was, "Today's Internet as opposed to that of the Middle Ages?") For example, it decries book self-publishing as an Internet phenomenon. Which isn't technically correct, since most books are not actually published on the net. But to get back to history: Self-publishing was the main model of book publishing before the 19th century. Everyone can name "great works of literature" that were self-published, as well as "great authors" who published pseudonymously (which this book says is also an Internet phenomenon). Everyone can also name what now are judged really awful self-published books that were bestsellers in their time (for example, Lady Caroline Lamb's celebrity tell-all novel about her affair with Lord Byron). And, some at least can name journalists, such as the novelist Colette's first husband Willy, who shamelessly wrote positive reviews of work by spouses, friends, etc., at times under false names.

As someone who has both worked for "traditional" publishers as an editor and writer, and who has self-published, I don't feel the dismissal of all self-published books as junk is fair. Both traditional and self-publishers tend to view the public as a very important gatekeeper: Does the book sell well? If so, it's of significant value to a significant number of consumers--and its sales keep the publisher in business. Why is someone who invests all their money in self-publishing books considered a narcissist, while someone who invests all their money in self-publishing software is considered an entrepreneur? Well, that's partly because our culture has a low estimation of the arts, an attitude this book continually ascribes to the Internet but which is far more wide-ranging and long-standing. If people valued well-written works, our best magazines and newspapers wouldn't need to sell ads for other companies' products to stay in business--and therefore would not be suffering so from competitive advertising on the Internet. And also, readers would not be so eager to violate copyright law, a problem the Internet has increased exponentially by the ease of pirating works and distributing the copies.

I agree with this book's premise that there is simply too much stuff on the Internet. There is far more information and entertainment available to everyone, than any one person can ever use or effectively sort out. However, that has been true for a long time--the information just didn't use to be on the Internet. People have always chatted informally, and critiqued books, plays, etc. for their friends--they just didn't do as much of it in writing. Since the invention of photography, people have shown around their home photos and movies (and earlier, their amateur watercolors). Since the average person became literate, people have kept diaries--most just didn't make them public.

And, there have always been amateur publications and minor professional ones--little club newsletters, neighborhood newspapers, and so on. Publications for which there was _some_ gatekeeping, but readers never expected them to be of the same quality as a large daily newspaper or national magazine. Nor have readers ever expected a tabloid to be the same kind of publication as a major daily. But, I do not agree with the author's premise that gatekeepers for publications, no matter how prestigious, are so invariably right that readers should simply accept whatever they say. Everyone should learn to analyze and evaluate the information they receive (though most people don't seem to) no matter whether the source is a blog on the Internet, a tabloid, or a major daily newspaper

I believe, by the way, that the insatiable appetite for attention and confession displayed on many amateur e-groups and blogs, is fueled by the practices of some traditional media, especially television and the tabloids. After years of seeing the media obsess over the most minute details of celebrities' lives--not to mention any real scandals--people have come to believe that the public is equally fascinated with all details of their own lives, and that publishing those details turns them, too, into celebrities. Any potentially scandalous behavior of their own seems like just good copy, as celebrity drinking problems and adulteries do to the tabloids. For these amateurs any attention--real or fancied--is a valued payment.

_The Cult of the Amateur_ points out many problems inherent in this transitional period. The models for magazine, book, and newspaper publishing, and the distribution of music and films, are drastically changing. Major and excellent businesses are losing money; many smaller ones have been bankrupted.

But, I believe that within a few years a new stratification of publication and distribution will arise, to aid both readers and publishers. Professional online (or even printed) publications, paid for by subscription or otherwise, will aid readers by doing what traditional book and magazine publishers have always done. That is, by sorting through a vast quantity of information submitted, choosing and collecting that of particular interest on a specific topic, or to a certain group of readers, then editing and otherwise refining the information to ensure the best quality and presentation. Ultimately, such online publications would greatly aid readers adrift in a sea of search results--and also, by making money, be able to pay their contributors and editors. (I agree with this book that most writers and artists can't spend the huge amount of time, and often money, required for professionalism unless someone pays them; whether this is consumers buying the work, or companies helping to produce and/or distribute the work in return for a share of the profits.) So, perhaps people wanting to read amateur work will read blogs, just as people who do not want an in-depth book review have always asked friends casual questions about the book. But readers wanting quality will turn to professional publications, on line or in print; just as they've long turned to newspapers, rather than rumors, for most of their news.

Unfortunately, the publishers that figure out how to make money in the new world of publishing and distribution, may not be the same as some of the best ones now in business. Also, making money in publishing, music, and films _does_ depend on the enforcement of copyright law, and given the ethics of many Internet users, I think publishers need better technical protection systems than any now existing. I do not believe most publishers can continue to rely on ad sales--there are just too many places to advertise cheaply on the Internet.

This book continually points the free-ad-competition finger at Craigslist. But the fact is that any small business can now create a large, four-color, long-term website of their own for less than the price of one printing of one classified (or small display) ad in a major newspaper or magazine: And most of them are doing it. Also, an enormous number of websites, including amateur ones, are trying to sell banner ads and links. With so many Internet venues for cheap advertising--even if Craigslist went out of business instantly--the revenues from most advertising sold either on the Internet or off it are likely to continue minimal.

I also believe that new software will be developed to help the individual consumer search for and sort out the material of most interest to him or her (which is a different issue from whether it is "good").

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, irritatingly, keeps returning to the Monkeys and Typewriters analogy (writes your dear correspondent, a monkey). It is true there may not be much talent behind the infinite typewriters, but the evolutionary lesson is that there doesn't need to be, as long as we have tools, be they Google algorithms or manual reputation management devices (things like Amazon's "helpful review" voting buttons) to sort the wheat from the chaff. And like it or not, we *do* have these tools: they're the sine non qua of Web 2.0, the thing without which it would never have got off the ground.

And Wikipedia (or Linux, or eBay, or Amazon's customer review system) is potent evidence of that. That there are notorious cases, a few of which Keen recounts, doesn't detract from the fact that Wikipedia is largely comprised of brilliant articles, with helpful links and useful surrounding discussion, a complete history, and those articles that aren't so good are obviously not: all you need to pack for a visit is your critical faculties. Again, if the choice were blind faith in Encyclopaedia Britannica or a sceptical read of Wikipedia, I know which I'd have, and which I'd counsel for my children - especially since Wikipedia is automatically up-to-date, preternaturally following the zeitgeist, and replete with good know-how on things that Britannica would never have in a million years. Most of the time, we don't need a nobel-prize certified article, and in Britannica wouldn't get one anyway, if what we wanted to know about was *The Knights who say "Ni"*.

Elsewhere Keen misunderstands Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jaques Rousseau, the Correspondence Theory of Truth, implies that traditional media isn't systemically biased, assumes his fellow men have no sense of scepticism whatever (because something is watched on YouTube, Keen assumes it is necessarily believed true), and constantly fails to see the double standards in his own arguments: Complaining that traditional media is losing out to a swarm of unpaid, underresourced amateurs, Keen suddenly remarks "but in reality it's often those with the loudest, most convincing message, and the most money to spread it, who are being heard". Plus ca change, eh?

Lastly, Keen laments the passing of specialist record and book shops like Tower, whose "unparalleled" and "remarkably diverse selection" will be lost to us for ever. Clearly he's no online shopper then, since dear old Amazon would lick all of them put together - but Amazon, he says, lacks the dedicted expertise of sales assistants that could have stepped out of Nick Hornby's Hi Fidelity. Except that it doesn't, since it has literally millions of them - people like you and me - who can offer our tuppence worth gladly and without thought of recompense.

The thing is, there *is* a debate to be had here, though not quite the apocalyptic one that this author believes is necessary, and at times Keen touches on it, but his brimming prurience and needless moral disgust - at the cost of level-headed anlysis and expostion - towards a community which has simply adjusted to the new social envinronment more quickly than traditional political and business models have makes this a poor entry for the purposes of kicking off that debate.

In the mean time, Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and Lawrence Lessig's Code: Version 2.0 (neither of which Keen seems to have read) might be a better place for interested persons to start.

Olly Buxton

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.

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, just as his diatribe against online pornography glosses over the many years in which Playboy and Penthouse magazines and X-rated tapes and DVDs have been readily available. Nor has plagiarism suddenly appeared out of thin air - students have been copying from library books and using one another's term papers for decades. The world is not so much getting worse or more immoral as it is changing the vehicles through which those same activities are experienced.

In his last chapter, Keen discusses as solutions some of the actions that mainstream media and other organizations are taking in response to the Internet's evolution. Of course, in doing so, he undercuts to a fair degree his own earlier arguments by demonstrating that economic incentives will spur the creative reactions in music, cinema, publishing, and journalism necessary for survival, even if some consolidation is required - perfect examples of Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction from radical innovation. THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR contains the kernel of an interesting argument, but Keen and his editors at Doubleday simply allowed this book to wander too far from its starting point and become far too strident with its moralizing tone. By the closing pages, Keen has turned into just another blogger, only this time in print. Bottom line: overhyped and not worth the time or the $22.95.

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.

The long and short of "The Cult of the Amateur" is that it takes an interesting argument--that the democratization of information sharing may lead to a decline in the quality of said information--and does a remarkably poor job of marshaling evidence or logic to support that claim. In the course of this book we are asked to believe that most readers simply believe whatever they read, wherever they read it. We are told that "experts" are the only legitimate arbiters in matters of fact or taste (no effort whatsoever is made to define what constitutes expertise in any given field). We are informed that mainstream news media are bias free (except of course in op-ed pieces). We are actually--I am not making this up--asked to lament the fact that YouTube has made it easier for racist politicians to be caught and exposed for all the world to see in the act of hurling epithets. At one point we are even asked to equate Beck's sharing of music files with fans for remix purposes to a surgeon handing over his scalpel to a patient and encouraging him to do surgery on himself--an analogy so bad as to be laughable. Keen's arguments are so overstated, their premises so obviously flawed, his analogies so hobbled, that I can't help but wonder if he genuinely believes in what he's saying. Apparently he even has a blog--and we learn very early on in this book that blogging is a horrible thing.

Could it be that Keen is engaged in some sort of elaborate, ultra-ironic and self-canceling performance art?

While interesting points were occaisionally raised in the book. Keen's contempt for the internet generation is obvious and sections of the book are thick with bias.

An excerpt from a recent interview can help clarify what I mean, from the Guardian Online:
Keen: "Today's under-25 generation should be more focused on the laborious work of learning about the world than in expressing their often inchoate and ill-informed opinions. What, exactly, have you learned from the under-25 generation about the war in Iraq or the media business that you didn't already know?"

To not trust the under 25 generation to know of the attrocities of war, when the Iraq war is being fought nearly ENTIRELY by those under the age of 25, shows clearly the contempt he has for all things "young" and "new." While he retracted this comment later in the interview, similar rampant and unapologetic idiocy can be found throughout the book, as was noted by other reviewers. Pass on this one, you can do much better.

It may not sound all that catchy, but millions upon millions have taken up the battle cry of the Web 2.0 revolution: "All things user-generated and participatory!" According to the search engine company Technorati, as of April 2007, the blogosphere boasted nearly 70 million blogs, with 120,000 added daily, while MySpace held over 182 million profiles. And those figures don't include the ever-increasing numbers of Wikipedia entries, Facebook profiles, message board postings, file sharing sites, or YouTube videos. For Web 2.0 visionaries, the rapid proliferation of user-generated/participatory sites pushes the world toward the dream of democratized media. For Andrew Keen, it harbingers a dystopia.

In his self-described "polemic," The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Doubleday, 205 pages) Keen, a Silicon entrepreneur turned cultural critic, asserts that "democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civil discourse, and belittling expertise, experience, and talent." Although Keen's general concerns possess merit--the difficulty of determining the validity of internet content, the saturation of the net with drivel, the need to protect the work of musicians and writers--his propensity for one-sided analysis, exaggeration and disparaging caviling undermine his arguments.

Keen makes his most cogent point when addressing the reliability of user-generated information. Wikipedia, the popular user-edited encyclopedia, draws repeated criticism from Keen. "By empowering the amateur," he writes, "we are undermining the experts who contribute to a traditional resource like the Encyclopedia Britannica." (He is in error to an extent--there are some experts among the site's contributors). Keen is troubled not only by the site's "democratic" editing system but also by the anonymity of the contributors, which allowed for a writer known as "Essjay" to pose as a college professor when he was, in fact, a twenty-four-year-old man from Kentucky with no post-high school degrees. Keen's wariness of Wikipedia is justified, but rather than providing compelling evidence for the inferiority/unreliability of a typical entry compared to one from a traditional encyclopedia, he resorts to barbs and overstatements: ". . . while Dr. William Connolley may be able to discern the misinformed ravings of moonbats (a term Eric Raymond, a respected open-source pioneer, used to describe the Wikipedia community) from the wisdom of experts, the average Internet user cannot. Most of us assume that the information we take in can be trusted. But when the information is created by amateurs, it rarely can be."

Keen further suggests that the participatory nature of Web 2.0 taints users' understanding of "authorship" and leads to plagiarism. He cites an Education Weekly survey in which 54% of the students admitted to plagiarizing from the internet and a 2005 study conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity in which 77% of the 50,000 undergrads polled didn't think internet plagiarism was a "serious" issue. Of course, Keen is right to abhor plagiarism, but he doesn't delve deeply enough in his analysis. The "blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth" stems from a relativistic world view that began pervading our culture long before the inception of the internet.

Keen then turns his attention to the amateurs he already blasted in the introduction, where he likened them to the monkeys in T.H. Huxley's infinite monkeys/infinite typewriters scenario: "And instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys--many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins--are creating endless digital forests of mediocrity. For today's amateur monkeys can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays, and novels."

Keen is certainly not alone in bemoaning the woeful, and sometimes deplorable, content that permeates many user-based cites. But while glorying in his pompous denouncement of amateur work, he disregards the fact that the "experts" and "cultural gatekeepers" he extols throughout the book began as amateurs and that Web 2.0 houses the work of plenty of gifted and intelligent amateurs.

But his belittling of the amateur seems to stem as much from nostalgia as it does from his detesting of atrocious work. He devotes nine pages to an elegiac account of Tower Records, lamenting that "Tower's remarkably diverse selection cannot be replicated." For anyone whose immediate response would be "Amazon," he later writes, "But what these online stores don't have is the deeply knowledgeable Tower clerk to act as cultural tastemaker. Instead, our buying choices depend upon the anonymous Amazon.com reviewer--a very poor substitute for the bodily encounters that Tower once offered." While there's something to be said for personal interaction, how does he know that an Amazon reviewer cannot be as musically knowledgeable as his beloved Tower clerk? Not to mention, metacritic.com, a website that culls reviews from dozens of respected print and online publications, would prove more informative than one person.

As he notes, illegal downloading and piracy have impacted the music industry. But Keen is loose with his statistics in several places. For example, regarding the music industry he says, "Thanks to the rampant digital piracy spawned by file-sharing technology, sales of recorded music dropped over 20 percent between 2000 and 2006." The source he cites, "No Suit Required" by Jeff Howe, merely notes the decline in sales; Keen attributes it all to piracy.

Piracy has impacted the movie industry as well, with the Motion Picture Association of America estimating the American movie industry lost $6.1 billion in worldwide revenue to all types of digital piracy, with 32% of the lost revenue coming from illegal internet downloads. Keen laments legal enterprises, though, such as ClickStar, Netflix, and Amazon that have cut into box office sales. He even discusses the disappointing returns for Snakes on a Plane despite an extensive internet marketing campaign and seems oblivious to how his relying on such a throwaway film to make his point raises questions about just how qualified he is to be a tastemaker.

According to Keen, Web 2.0 is to be blamed for the troubles across all traditional media, saying, "Every defunct record label, or laid-off newspaper reporter, or bankrupt independent bookstore is a consequence of "free" user-generated Internet content--from Craiglist's free advertising, to YouTube's free music videos, to Wikipedia's free information." Ridiculous exaggeration aside, Keen later expounds on the declining revenue and lost jobs for traditional media, particularly metropolitan newspapers, decrying Craigslist for taking away advertising dollars from them. The simple fact is that if a service is free (Craigslist) or cheaper (iTunes, discount retailers), then consumers will opt for low/no-cost efficiency.

Keen veers away from his thesis in the last third of the book, discussing the moral and cultural decay demonstrated by sexual predators, internet pornography, online gambling addictions, and identify theft. Few readers would quibble with Keen that these are serious problems, but the internet is but the latest way to feed such vices and evils, and those conniving enough to use them to harm others are hardly amateurs.

In the last chapter Keen examines some ways in which illegal uses of Web 2.0 are being curtailed and how traditional media industries are beginning to successfully adjust their business models to expand to the internet while retaining their traditional forms as well-- all of which makes Keen's fear that professional media is facing impending doom seem, yes, exaggerated.

Ultimately, Keen's jeremiad is too broad. Upholding truth and decency is indeed imperative to preserving our culture, but superciliously stifling the "noble amateur" isn't. Talent isn't limited to the tastemakers; and though the din of Web 2.0 grows with each new jejune blog, navel-gazing song, or asinine video, true talent, be it professional or amateur, rings distinctly.

I am very disappointed in this book, particularly becuase I whole-heartedly agree with the case the author did a poor job of making. The Cult of the Amateur is written by a former web entrepreneur (who developed one of the first internet music websites) who has grown increasingly concerned with a hidden downside of the "democratization" of the internet: when everyone is free to publically opine and distribute their voice, then the idea of the "expert" or "authoritative voice" becomes lost. And contrary to the egalitarian sentiment, the idea that some people's voices may be more informed, knowledgeable, and worthy of consdieration than others is a very important one. (Should a scientist or blogger be the voice we should heed about scientific issues? Should a reporter or a youtube podcaster be the better source of info about political issues?)

I agree with all of this. The problem is that the book's author doesn't really make the case so much as he opines, vents, and rhetoricizes. In a huge irony, the author's diatribe against bloggers is of no better quality or insight than the very bloggers he rails against! Except that his book is about 190 pages longer than the average blog post.

I got through about half of this book before I realized that the author simply rehashes and rehashes points he made in his introduction. (1) The concept of authority is very important to having an informed citizenry. (2) The idea of "democratic" technology like blogs, youtube podcasts, etc, threatens that concept. (3) The system of media we have in place is often superior becuase, unlike blogs and the like, it is subject to fact-checking, legal constraints and other checks against irresponsibility. If you remember these, you don't need to read the book because the rest involves the author giving example after example and rehashing one of the above points.

The other thing thta annoyed me is that the author's case is a very one-sided approach to what is, to me, a very nuanced issue. Reading this book makes one think that there are really no benefits to the proliferation of blogs, youtube, etc. That there are also benefits to thes technologies is completely missing from the authors discussion. Instead of seeing this as a "with the good comes the bad" issue, our author comes off as a cranky curmudgeon who laments everything that has happened after the year 2000. I am sure he is not really this cranky, but if not, he did a lousy job of dispelling this interpretation.

In close, this book is simply not worth your time. As a book of ideas, it is empty (even though the author's case could have been strong). Even if you are looking for punditry, this book is just not well written. The words "monkey" and "stupid" are used way too often for me to consdier the author as a talented rhetoricist.

You should just as well save your money for another book.

After all, haven't we all been thinking how there is no selection process with internet publishing? It's really essentially a crap shoot. When Kurt Vonnegut described the internet age as one where people are now "being instead of becoming", I think he was talking about exactly this. This is the era of instant publishing and the simulation of everything. You can pretend to do anything in the virtual world. You can print anything. There is so much, it's become a noise.

However, destroying our culture? There are still professional peer-reviewed journals. There are still professional reporters. While I am not much of a fan of blogging, there are the professionals who blog and are already known due to their public status. They are more read than the rest of them. In the early days of widespread printing press usage, anyone with enough money could get their ideas and, in many cases, disinformation out. You could print newspapers and fliers saying the British were overtaxing us, King George was evil, and rally around patriotism and freedom, all because you wanted to later steal Indian lands to grow more hemp and get richer. In this day in age, we instead have to deal with the Rupert Murdoch's of the world doing their own version of this and corporate elites buying third-world newspapers overseas to start coups.

Attacking blogging and amateur reporters as being the cause for the belief of WMD's in Iraq is nonsense. In fact, it was the internet crowd who tended to get it right from the beginning. The "pro" media was being fed garbage by Cheney's charter-less propaganda office. I was on Politics.com prior to the Iraq invasion telling everyone this smelled of one big marketing campaign. And unlike Michael Moore, I did not just get lucky. Like clockwork, Howard Baer shut the site down, Dan Rather switches into "we're going to war" mode, and mainstream dissent was crushed. The REAL journalists failed the people who were strictly looking to them for insights.

My point is, the established media is not always the most reliable and is constantly putting its own "drama" spin on everything while doing everything it can to insulate viewers from offense. Historically, the worst journalism is profit-motivated. At least on the internet, whether it's a blog or Wiki, it is usually understood as a tentative, work-in-progress at all times. And people are usually told whether something is an information repository or an attempt at research journalism. How often does that happen on TV? The reason established media outlets work so well for propaganda is because the people watching tend to take it at face value and any corrections or successful rebuttals later on are usually never seen and the incorrect viewpoint remains permanently in the viewer's mind like dogma. Just because a few lazy students write papers based on bad information from the net they never bothered to fact-check does not invalidate the medium. Give the student an F and move on. Am I supposed to feel sorry for them?!

On the art side, Keen is again way off the mark. The reason films are getting pirated like crazy is because the quality between the pirates and the real deal has dropped sharply. Film has gone from an over-5000 line format with 35mm optical transfers (much more with 70mm) to now routinely only 2000 lines of resolution. Aronofsky attempted to buck the trend with The Fountain, an optically shot, effected, and printed masterpiece, only to have the studio system continuously stifle him. It's a miracle that film was even made. And now that awful theatrical DLP that Lucas popularized still only promises a measly 1080 lines...the same as at home. The film industry has a chance to bring back the crowds by advancing technology in the film arts by using real film stock, not moving to inferior, cheap HD, more digital intermediaries, and low resolution digital exhibition. They encountered the same issue with the invention of television, and they responded with color film and scope. The industry has done just the opposite this time.

On the music front, there has been the chance to embrace new high resolution formats that would compel people not to steal crummy-sounding MP3's. This was gaining momentum over the last few years. Beginning this year, however, DVD-Audio, DVD-V 24/96 (or DAD), and SACD have been almost completely abandoned by the record companies. Why? They've decided to go back to the atrocious "Perfect Sound Forever" CD hoax, and supplement it with more crummy 44.1khz digital downloads. They are perpetuating the very trend that was spelling their industry's devolution since the abandonment in the U.S. of vinyl. Again, it's the recording industry's own damn fault.

The "art industries" are only going to lose money in the long run because of their own short-sightedness. If there's no money to be made, where do all of these bands come from on MTV? And why do 90% of them still sound the same and suck so bad? The last two of three Curve albums were sold directly over the internet, from a band that spent their entire career fighting against the status quo...even before the internet. Things haven't changed much as to which "art" gets mass exposure and which has to struggle to find an audience. At least the internet presents an outlet for those artists whose potential fan base is small. Look at the electronic musician Arksun. Prior to him showing up on MP3.com (back when it was an indie site), he didn't even have a fan base. Besides, did Edgar Allen Poe or Emily Dickinson have book deals and get rich? Right now, money is motivating a company to publish a book by OJ Simpson. Is that a sign of a superior selection process? In many respects, Keen is choosing to see what he wants.