The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture
Amateur hour has arrived, and the audience is running the show
In a hard-hitting and provocative polemic, Silicon Valley insider and pundit Andrew Keen exposes the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately the very innovation and creativity that forms the fabric of American achievement.
Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.
In today’s self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.
The very anonymity that the Web 2.0 offers calls into question the reliability of the information we receive and creates an environment in which sexual predators and identity thieves can roam free. While no Luddite—Keen pioneered several Internet startups himself—he urges us to consider the consequences of blindly supporting a culture that endorses plagiarism and piracy and that fundamentally weakens traditional media and creative institutions.
Offering concrete solutions on how we can reign in the free-wheeling, narcissistic atmosphere that pervades the Web, THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR is a wake-up call to each and every one of us.
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15.61 Amazon 11,041 reviews |
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| From: Amazon Posted: Jun 04, 2008 Type: User Review |
Horrible Book
This book is a strong candidate for the worst book I've ever read. So why two stars?
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 2.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: May 21, 2008 Type: User Review |
Thought provoking.
This book is closer to 5 stars than 1. I don't just measure a book by how much I agree with it. I actually disagreed with the author on many of his points (see other reviews for details) but the one thing I could not do was stop reading, stop...
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 5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 27, 2008 Type: User Review |
He didn't get much right
First, I agree that there are significant problems with accuracy and reliability of information on the WWW.
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 1.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 25, 2008 Type: User Review |
Nahuel
Evidently a large amount of the comments here were written by people that feel threatened by the light that Andrew Keen sheds upon the Internet and especially Web 2.0.
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5.00/5 |
| From: Amazon Posted: Apr 25, 2008 Type: User Review |
Disingenuous
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...
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1.00/5 |
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