It is refreshing to read a book about web2.0, or user-generated content or crowdsourcing that is not written by someone goggle-eyed about how it is the best thing since even before sliced bread. This one provides such refreshment in spades: Far from vaunting limitless possibilities, unprecedented end-user empowerment and long tails of endless choice, Andrew Keen has written the anti-internet polemic of the decade. Actually he does make a lot of mention of the net's endless choice—it's just that it is all drivel, so it's worse than limited choice because who wants to spend their whole life raking through rivers of sewage to find a dropped earring?

This reviewer suspected that Keen would have made not a few online enemies with this book, and in briefly searching its title she was not disappointed. It looks as though the author’s self-confessed handicap as a converted, failed 'net entrepreneur is fuel for much ridicule. But she's sure that ignorance, and lack of experience or involvement in the movement would probably have been lambasted even more heavily by critics. Of course, one does have to pay for this book to read it—unlike the subject matter of most of its tirades—and it’s often a smart (lucrative) business strategy to write something that will get a lot of people browned off.

This reviewer doesn’t know how much Keen has collected from its publishers to date, but her guess would be that some points are deserved here, for: “If you can’t join them, beat 'em”

That aside, there’s not really enough to be said in here that requires the 200 pages used to get to the last word, so much of it is, to put it unkindly, empty-headed ranting. The affront that is taken about internet hoaxing, and the fear that is apparent about the possibility for malicious harm are genuine enough points. But they come across as overdone. The citing of examples of “viral” episodes where something-that-is-wrong-on-the-internet sometimes propagates like a bush fire are entertaining and sometimes outrageous, but leave the impression that Keen misses the point about how rare they are as a fraction of the totality of unverified, unverifiable 2.0 content (and sure it's drivel, if you thought it was supposed to interest you) that is fashioned continually.

Even the notion of regarding every tweet, blog post, youtube contribution and facebook whatever as being in the public domain—and therefore potentially another ignition point for a web-transmitted conflagration of stuff & nonsense—is incorrect. There is as much chance of essentially private conversations between a handful of buddies who share online ever being publicly viewed, as there is of the millionth monkey’s Shakespearian Sonnet being found, amongst the random keystrokes of its fellows. Most of the traffic that the author finds so abominable is unlikely to ever be intended for public consumption—it just uses technology that could allow that to happen, which seems to be a major difference. Similiarly the ubiquitous anonymity of nearly everything is misleading, because within their micro social circles, the real identity of most online aliases is probably perfectly well known. Actually, this makes Keen’s pasting of examples of banality look rather nosy, as someone who skulks around public places listening to strangers talking to each other and taking notes. Especially since it's for the purpose of investigative polemicising.

Lurking behind the stream of attacks on mass amateurisation, but audible nonetheless—because for all that, Keen’s arguments are engaging and entertainingly written rather than strident, shrill calls to action—is a bigger worry. This is the social decline (AKA “dumbing down”) that is feared to result from the new culture, from its new rules, and its only slightly older tech kit. Rather than come out and say that society is getting dumber, the author points to declines in revenue, and therefore jobs, training and talent, of the professional league of publishing; in investigative journalism, general print, music, and other forms of creative content. Presumably if we are demanding less of all these, and filling the space with rubbish and/or ripped-off mashed-up contributions of our own, then it is a safe conclusion that critical standards of knowledge, thinking and artistic appreciation are all going to take a dive? This reviewer suspects that deduction to be significantly too negative. But at least she’s been warned (and amused)

Francesca

An extremely frustrating book. Andrew Keen's thesis, that Web 2.0 is destroying our culture, may in fact be provable. However, this book is full of obviously fallacious arguments (too many to list here, but Lawrence Lessig has collected a few at http://www.lessig.org/blog/2007/05/ke...), making convincing me impossible.

Keen rails against the amateur blogger giving their opinion on something they know nothing about. He is guilty of the same sin, but in print. ( )

I don't agree with everything is on this book, but I sincerely believe we need more books like this to fully appreciate the extent, dangers, and consequences of the web2.0 revolution.
On July 13, 2007 I had the pleasure and the honor to interview Andrew Keen for the Novedge blog. Here is the link:
http://blog.novedge.com/2007/07/an-in... ( )

Should we tear down the veil and give the unwashed masses the keys to the secrets of the temple?
Oop, too late. Now what?
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment."
Duh? Hell, yeah!

BUY, BORROW, or BURN?
BORROW ( )

http://culturalsnow.blogspot.com/2009...

I've spent so much time and energy over the last year or so sneering at Andrew Keen and his anti-Web 2.0 spiel The Cult of the Amateur that it seems a bit superfluous actually to read the bloody thing, which I did last week. It would be charitable, if a little embarrassing, to report that I'd got the poor man completely wrong, and that his apocalyptic vision of the damage that blogs, social networks and Wikipedia are inflicting upon contemporary culture is bang on the money.

Well, it's not, but hundreds of others have already taken him to task over that, and I'm not going to chuck another bundle of twigs on the pyre just to make a point. That said, here's a very quick flavour of his argument: he expresses horror about a New York Times report that "50 percent of all bloggers blog for the sole purpose of reporting and sharing experiences about their personal lives."

Well, as that consummate professional, the blessed Gene Hunt would put it, "You make that sound like a bad thing." Keen joins all the other defiantly analogue numpties (Janet Street-Porter, Mary Dejevsky, etc) in making the reductive and simplistic assumption that because bloggers don't necessarily write brilliantly incisive news stories, they're bad at what they do; which is about as sensible as asserting that because Cristiano Ronaldo doesn't get many wickets, he's a rubbish cyclist. I thought we dealt with all this well over two years ago? Ah. I see we did.

So Keen's grasp of blogging and other manifestations of Web 2.0 is on a par with all those broadsheet journos who suddenly tried to get their heads round Twitter when Stephen Fry got on board. Little or no surprise there. But what astonished me about his book is the number of other things that he appears not to understand.

Let's take economics. Now, I can't claim to be the heir to Keynes or Friedman, or even Robert Peston, but I think even I can see the flaw in Keen's objections to advertisers running user-generated clips at the 2007 SuperBowl:

"According to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the average professionally produced thirty-second spot costs $381,000. Yet Frito-Lay paid a mere $10,000 to each of the five finalists on the table. That's $331,000 that wasn't paid to professional filmmakers, scriptwriters, actors and marketing companies — $331,000 sucked out of the economy."

"Sucked out of the economy"? Since when has a cost saving been money sucked out of the economy? It's not as if Mr Frito and Mr Lay went off to some remote Scottish island, KLF-style, and burned that $331,000. So it didn't go to filmmakers or scriptwriters: but Frito-Lay doesn't exist to keep filmmakers and scriptwriters in business. They could have spent it on salaries or shareholder dividends, they could have knocked a couple of cents off some of their products, or redecorated their offices or given it to charity; all of which would have seen that money re-enter the economy.

Later, Keen demonstrates further that sums aren't his strong point when he multiplies 99 cents (the cost of an iTunes download) by 20 billion (allegedly the number of songs 'stolen' by downloaders in a year) and makes $19.99 billion. Maybe he can use that stray 190 million to pay off all those scriptwriters who are going to have to sell their grannies because the likes of Frito-Lay have sucked all the money out of the economy, like big, cheese-flavoured Hoovers.

But this is just a sideshow to Keen's most egregious flaw. It's not just that he doesn't understand Web 2.0, the thing he's attacking; he doesn't even seem to understand old media, the thing he purports to want to save. The history of print and broadcast journalism is strewn with examples of corruption, hyperbole, political spin and honest-to-goodness mistakes. Yet Keen lays into the online video Loose Change (which claimed that the 9/11 were carried out by the US government) and the Moonie-owned webzine Insight — originally a hard-copy magazine — with its smears against Hillary Clinton, as if wacky conspiracy theories and politically-motivated muckraking were invented at about the same time as wireless internet.

Moreover, he seems to believe that one of the main things that distinguishes traditional media from self-defined citizen journalists is paper qualifications. "After all," he sneers, attacking the credentials of bloggers such as Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Glenn Reynolds, "who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site?"

Well, I've written for major (non-Moonie-owned) print publications in Britain and Asia, which I suppose makes me a journalist of sorts. And I've never set foot in a journalism class. The closest I've come to proper training was in 1993, when I sat in a pokey little office near Carnaby Street while a former disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh showed me how to sub-edit. "Above all, make sure it fits on the page," he said, and I think he was probably right.

In Keenland, it's not just journalists who need degrees and diplomas, though. He attacks Wikipedia by comparing it unfavourably with the Oxford English Dictionary, a product that apparently exemplifies the benefits of a properly trained and accredited editorial team. He neglects to mention, however, that two of the men most responsible for the success of the original OED, James Murray and Henry Bradley, were, by his own definition, mere amateurs, not even having attended university (a distinction they share with George Bernard Shaw, lauded by Keen as an example of the 'qualified' contributors that Britannica has and Wikipedia lacks). Incidentally, I got the information about Murray and Bradley, not from Wikipedia, but from a rather good book called The Meaning of Everything, written by Simon Winchester, who has worked with great success as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian and The Sunday Times. He read geology at Oxford, and I rather suspect he doesn't hold many journalism qualifications.

It would appear that Keen's (wilful?) lack of understanding even extends to the title of his own book. If we take the risk of conflating blogging and journalism under a general heading of people-who-write-for-public-consumption, what defines amateurs isn't lack of ability; it's nothing more than the fact that they don't get paid for doing what they do. Which may imply a lack of seriousness, but also frees them from a hell of a lot of other pressures, such as the demands of proprietors or advertisers. When he has a stab at the "amateur", what he's really getting at, in his dim and disgruntled manner, is the "amateurish", a label that can be applied to a depressingly large chunk of professionally written product. Including, as I now know, Keen's own silly, ill-considered book. ( )