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. ( )

A very good book, but one that is fairly predictable in many ways. Keen really seems overly nostalgic about 20th century technologies. The author works hard to present an argument that basically states that web 2.0 is basically destroying our culture. While there certainly are some compelling points to ponder, I wonder in a way if he didn't adopt this view point as a way to create an avenue to profit from the writing of this book. This is well worth the ready, but save the money and check it out from your local library. ( )

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. ( )

http://ffedor.blogspot.com/2008/06/im... ( )

Keen raises many valid points about the Internet and its effect on media and commerce (especially record and book stores) But I think the truth about the internet is somewhere between his view and the view of those who find nothing wrong with the way things are going.

While I agree that blogs and other sources of "news" tend to undermine traditional news sources, many of those tradtional sources aren't always as "expert" and "professional" as Keen would have us believe. For example the Baseball blog "Fire Joe Morgan" is built on pointing out the absurd and poorly researched viewpoints of many traditional baseball journalists who know less about the game than many fans.

I also don't like his seeming belief that only people who have a college degree and years of study are bright enough to give an opinion or write something of value. There are plenty of smart, educated, and informed people who didn't go to university. Keen's viewpoint leans slightly to the side of Elitism. (As my uncle, a high school principal told me, "Education is overrated.")

The internet has its flaws, but it has good points as well. The trick is filtering out the bad and finding the good. ( )

A month ago, I went to Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, where Andrew Keen held a debate about his book "The Cult of the Amateur". I heard of him before, and consulted his blog a number of times, which did not draw my attention very much. I thought he made a point through exaggeration, and nothing wrong with it if, at least, there is some data and reasonable argumentation backing his statements. I was quite interested if he would convince me, because I thought it was good to hear something about the negative side of Web 2.0. And negative it was.

It turned out to be pretty disappointing, both the lecture of Keen, which was somewhat engaging, using many examples and being very enthusiastic and cynical, and the reply by the other persons who were invited. Although examples can be engaging and create more understanding about a subject, you can hardly generalize them into always-true statements, since.. well, they are examples. But that was exactly what Keen was doing, examples prove his point of view.. a pretty childish way of argumentation, which he used extensively in his book as well.

Andrew Keen is an angry man. He is angry at anything that resembles Web 2.0, he despises creations of amateurs online, filesharing, remixing of content, and he embraces everything that came before Web 2.0. In his anger, it must have been very hard for him to follow a consistent line of reasoning. The argumentation in the book is so lousy, I think I have never seen such lousy reasoning. And I don't get it. Although he admires and continuously points out the advantages and necessity of cultural gatekeepers, working at traditional media companies, it seems like he had not had any editor at all. This was exactly the point made by Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, in his very funny review about the book.

The basic argument in the book is that Web 2.0, or the ability of anyone able to contribute anything (from news to videos to music) online, diminishes the traditional structures and organizations in the media industry. This will damage our culture and in the end ruin it. Because anyone can put anything online, the quality is becoming less reliable of what you read and see, and more intertwined with commerce etc. There are so many flaws in this piece of rubbish, that it seems a Sisyphean task trying to document them. Maybe.... in a collective effort we could do that, as has been intended by Lawrence Lessig.

Although the book flaws in a substantial way (factual errors & bad argumentation), the basic point made in the book has some significance: quality of information and trust in people and information is decreasing in an ever-expanding online information space. There is a lot of rubbish online, and maybe, it has become less easy for kids and adults to distinguish high quality from low quality. Still, technology also enables people to overcome these problems. All in all.. don't bother reading the book.. just pick up the main message, which has some truth in it. As technology creates problems, don't forget it can also solve them. When I get hold of a book that offers a more substantiated critique and better advice in how to deal with the egalitarian characteristics of the Internet, I will post it here as well. ( )

Keen does a great job pointing out the fallacies in a lot of the silly talk about Web 2.0, free culture, the wisdom of crowds, and Time's "You". The book is a polemic aimed at a popular business audience, so you won't find any deep analysis here -- much of the argument is based on anecdote, newspaper articles and common sense. (There are undoubtedly many smart graduate students working on more rigorous studies, for which we might have to wait a little longer.) For what it is, though, Keen's book is great -- well-written, enjoyable, stimulating. My only quibble is with later chapters, where he loses focus and veers off into rants against internet gambling and pornography. Those topics are worthy of criticism, but seem like they would fit better in a different book.

(Reviewed at Question Technology: http://www.questiontechnology.org/blo...) ( )

Review: http://wartaalman.blogspot.com/2008/0... ( )

Andrew Keen's talk at the OLA Superconference was much better than the book which was a rather unbalanced rant. ( )

Keen recognizes that everyone who has access to the Internet can publish and produce on YouTube, Wikipedia, wikis, blogs, and a ton of other technologies. Thus, it is the age of the amateur as opposed to the expert, the edited work, the publishing house, the producer. Keen is worried like many librarians about the idea of quality information and how to help a generation trust not just themselves but also recognize expertise when they encounter it. For example, the compares Citizendium with Wikipedia where in the former, contributors must register with credentials before being allowed to contribute content. Librarians will cheer this one.

The Yin to the Yang of 'The Wisdom of Crowds'.

Andrew Keen makes some valid points -- his attack on the Wikipedia has made me think twice about using it as a source, or allowing my son to use it as source in school. But the book wanders, as he tries to cover all the evils of the Internet -- online porn, privacy, gambling -- and in the end, you feel this was little more than a rant. ( )

From Publishers Weekly
Keen's relentless "polemic" is on target about how a sea of amateur content threatens to swamp the most vital information and how blogs often reinforce one's own views rather than expand horizons. But his jeremiad about the death of "our cultural standards and moral values" heads swiftly downhill. Keen became somewhat notorious for a 2006 Weekly Standard essay equating Web 2.0 with Marxism; like Karl Marx, he offers a convincing overall critique but runs into trouble with the details. Readers will nod in recognition at Keen's general arguments—sure, the Web is full of "user-generated nonsense"!—but many will frown at his specific examples, which pretty uniformly miss the point. It's simply not a given, as Keen assumes, that Britannica is superior to Wikipedia, or that record-store clerks offer sounder advice than online friends with similar musical tastes, or that YouTube contains only "one or two blogs or songs or videos with real value." And Keen's fears that genuine talent will go unnourished are overstated: writers penned novels before there were publishers and copyright law; bands recorded songs before they had major-label deals. In its last third, the book runs off the rails completely, blaming Web 2.0 for online poker, child pornography, identity theft and betraying "Judeo-Christian ethics." (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ( )

The Internet of the 21st century, also called Web 2.0, has become a participatory marvel, letting anyone post anything, anywhere, without having to go through, or be approved by, anyone. According to this book, that is also its biggest drawback, not just for the Internet, but for all of American culture.

The two biggest culprits in the destruction of American culture are the sites Wikipedia and YouTube. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit at any time. It doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t know anything about the subject of the entry they are changing. It also doesn’t matter if the edited information is totally wrong, or downright malicious. No approval is required. The legitimate encyclopedias are suffering greatly; people would rather use Wikipedia with its potentially wrong information. YouTube is the video equivalent of Wikipedia. Again, anyone can post anything, with no thought given as to whether or not the video is accurate or fair.

The author explores the near-destruction of the music business by file sharing and downloading; the movie business is not far behind in terms of Internet-caused damage. The site craigslist has done major damage to newspaper ad revenue, a major source of money. Newspaper readership is steadily dropping, as people go to blogs for news, leading to the possibility of journalism becoming totally advertiser-driven, which would mean covering little more than celebrities, diets and self-help. Anything can be cut, pasted and re-mixed, putting great pressure on concepts of copyright and ownership. A major assertion of the author is that there are no “gate-keepers” on the Internet, no one to help the average person discover what information is, or is not, accurate.

There is hope on the horizon. In 2006, one of the creators of Wikipedia started Citizendium, a wiki encyclopedia but with experts who have the authority as the final word in their area of specialty. Legislation has been passed to protect kids from predators on sites like MySpace, but parents have the primary responsibility to know what their kids are doing online.

Lest anyone think otherwise, this is not some back-to-nature, anti-technology rant; the author is a Silicon Valley insider. This book is worth reading and recommended for everyone, from those who live on the Internet, to those who want nothing to do with it. ( )

Although this book avoids some of the big issues relating to Web 2.0, it has some useful thoughts in it.

I was hoping for an intelligent critique of the dangers of excess trust in the web 2.0 revolution. Instead I got a badly written rant on a par with the worst of the blogs the author professes to condemn.

Keen's criticisms of the reliance on amateurs to provide us with trusted information may well be valid in theory, but it's impossible to tell from this book. I started marking errors in reasoning with a scrap of paper for a bookmark, by the end of the book it was bristling with scraps almost every other page. Most can be summed up in two categories:

1) Wild exaggerations. Wikipedia 'is almost single-handedly killing the traditional information business'; The music industry 'is dying'.

2) Factually wrong claims. 'Online gaming is as addictive as cocaine, alcohol, and other substance abuse.' No. It's not. You could perhaps argue it's as addictive as, say, shopping, or even compulsive risk taking, but it's not *chemically* addictive. The addiction is qualitatively different.

The subtitle is 'How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy'. On the first point Keen is merely misguided and incoherent. On the second he is fundamentally wrong. An example:

Frito-Lay runs a competition to design an advert. A professionally produced advert would cost $381,000. The competition cost $50,000. According to Keen this means '$300,000 that wasn't paid to professional[s]... $331,000 sucked out of the economy.'

Excuse me? So Frito-Lay took the money out of their advertising budget and buried it under a stone somewhere, did they? Took it out in $10 bills and fed them into a shredder? Of course not. They spent the same money elsewhere. It may arguably be the case that the 'cult of the amateur' is harming the professional advertising industry, it is *not* assaulting the economy as a whole. Money is diverted from one sector into another. Likewise, even if expenditure on online advertising is largely wasted, this money is not removed from the economy, it's merely diverted in other hands. This misunderstanding renders most of Keen's analysis economic garbage.

This is not to say the book does not raise some interesting questions. Unfortunately, Keen does more harm than good for his own arguments. If you think you'll agree with his points, don't bother to read this book, you can probably come up with better arguments on your own. If you think you'll disagree with it, don't bother either, as it could fool you into thinking your case is stronger than it is... ( )

I totally disagreed with the premise of this book, which is why I wanted to read it. If you only read people who agree with you, how can you have a balanced assessment. That being said it was a struggle to get through this book. Clearly the author used a provacative and one sided attitude as a hook to bring in sales. The last chapter actually ofsets the ranting of the rest of the book and it would have been more readable if this content had been included in each of the previous chapters. ( )

Andrew Keen’s polemic against the internet is delicious to read, wherever you stand in the question: an inside, in-depth, all-round, wittily written, unashamedly one-sided and culturally conservative account of the emerging uses of the world wide web.

The author proposes that the electronic world erodes our culture instead of building it up; destroys the other media instead of expanding them; lowers “professional standards of truth, decency and creativity” through general unfiltered participation; invades privacy, endangers children, fuels addiction and crime, and installs, not the ultimate democracy and liberty, but “egoism” and “mob rule”.

After hearing too many enthusiastic endorsements of “the wisdom of the crowds”, it is refreshing to find a bold statement on “bad taste” and “mob rule” on the first page of an expert’s book! In fact, Keen’s brilliant work is not a rant against the culture of the internet; it is a plea for the traditional media and their creators, the qualified and experienced “cultural gatekeepers”, from newspaper editors to pop-music groups.

All Andrew Keen does is listing the dangers of the web, underpinned by hundreds of examples and figures, and recommending care in handling it – in order to safeguard our personal and professional lives, our copyright and income, our standards of reporting and researching, and precisely, our liberty and creativity.

Naturally, one could write a counterattack pro internet, and one certainly will; but one cannot empty the scale of the “contra” facts which “The cult of the amateur” presents. It is certainly good to have the scales in one’s mind at all times.

Christina Egan ( )

http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_averag... ( )

This book is a poorly researched, poorly thought out polemic chock full of logical pitfalls. He argues in defense of "big media": the news corporations, the RIAA, the publishing industry, etc., and decries the public taking away from them profits and jobs because of new means of production and consumption. Flitting from one "travesty" to another, he contradicts himself numerous times to suit his argument. In one chapter, the rigorous process of information vetting and editors keeps the media conglomerates reliable; in another, the evil bloggers can spread lies so fast that even big media will pick them up.

Keen undermines the degree to which people can take his argument seriously by devoting a chapter to blaming Web 2.0 for internet gambling addiction, kids seeing pornography, apparently the existence of fetishes, social isolation, and internet addiction, as if they didn't exist before Web 2.0. His remarks on privacy are the only vaguely worthwhile part of the book, though nothing you couldn't find elsewhere.

The conclusion mentioned in other reviews is a slight-of-hand trick, stating the obvious and indisputable (i.e. parents should be aware of what their children are doing on-line) as if the need for attentive parenting somehow proves his point. In his very last section, he proclaims a "moral responsibility ... to protect mainstream media against the cult of the amateur" equating this mainstream media with "professional standards of truth, decency, and creativity." It's enough to make anyone who's followed the RIAA in the last few years want to chuck the book in the trash bin.

Much as I'm tempted to do just that, I figure I'll keep it, in hopes of having a good laugh in 10 or 15 years, much like Flame Wars today.

In the meantime, I'm hoping the choice of the praise to put on the front cover says something about the degree to which a wide audience of informed individuals is taking this seriously-- it's from Larry Sanger, who Keen spends pages lauding.

(Q) ( )

Keen describes the subject of his book this way: "It's ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule. On steroids." He premise throughout the book is that Web 2.0 presents significant dangers to our culture. We have gone from trusting the experts to trusting the crowd. Framing his argument using network news, newspapers, the music recording industry, and the movie industry, he claims that we have switched from traditional "trusted" sources of content (i.e., people who had the knowledge and experience to bring us a high-quality product) to a bunch of hobbyists playing at being journalists or musicians or movie makers. I would agree with him on at least one point: I think we are drowning in a sea of mediocrity. But before we get ready to go down for the last time, a couple of thoughts.

First: My Dad told me long ago that "'X' is an unknown and a 'spurt' is a drip under pressure." In other words, possessing credentials does not indicate one has wisdom or even knowledge. It is just as likely to mean that they knew enough, long enough, to pass a test.

Second: Not everybody puts something on the web for the whole world. Frequently they put up pictures or a video or what ever for the enjoyment of family and friends. That's it. They aren't looking for the Pulitzer or an Emmy or a Grammy. The fact that you think it ridiculous doesn't matter; you weren't the intended audience.

One notion he raised that I think does have merit is the notion of anonymity: everybody can be anybody on the Internet. And that anonymity lets people say anything, true or not, and without consequence. Would we have less free speech if libel laws were applied to the Internet? Suppose you had to digitally sign everything you posted on the Internet. Would that change your behavior? Would it change mine?

Over all, a book that raises interesting issues. ( )