Andrew Keen
Andrew Keen | |
---|---|
British-American | |
Education | University of London (BA) University of California, Berkeley (MA) |
Occupation(s) | Author, teacher, entrepreneur, and public speaker |
Known for | The Cult of the Amateur Digital Vertigo The Internet is Not the Answer How to Fix the Future |
Andrew Keen (born c. 1960
Life
Keen was born in
Career
Keen returned to Silicon Valley in 1995 and founded Audiocafe.com,
In 2013, Keen founded FutureCast, a salon-style event series hosted by the AT&T Foundry and Ericsson, which brings together start-up entrepreneurs, investors, and technologists to discuss the digital revolution.[7] He is currently the host of "Keen On" show, a TechCrunch chat show.[8]
Criticism of Web 2.0
In 2005, Keen wrote that
It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone--even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 "empowers" our creativity, it "democratizes" media, it "levels the playing field" between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is "elitist" traditional media.[9]
On 5 June 2007, Keen released his first book The Cult of the Amateur, published by Doubleday Currency,[10] and gave a talk at Google the same day.[11] The book is critical of free, user-generated content websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Reddit and many others. He prominently featured in the 2008 Dutch documentary The Truth According to Wikipedia and was also featured in the 2010 American documentary Truth in Numbers?.
Keen stresses the importance of media literacy and claims that user generated blogs, wikis and other "democratized" media, cannot match the resources of mainstream media outlets.[12] Pointing to examples like being able to gather teams together, travel to dangerous locations (sometimes spending years in the region) and having skilled and experienced editors oversee the process,[10] Keen forecasts that if the current Web 2.0 mentality—where content is either given away or stolen—continues, in 25 years[specify] there will not exist a professional music business, newspaper industry or publishing business and challenges his audience to question whether they value these or not.[13]
Keen discusses often-overlooked problems with participatory technology. He describes the Internet in amoral terms, saying it is a mirror of human culture. "We see irreverence, and vitality, and excitement. We see a youthfulness. But we also see, I think, many of the worst developments in modern cultural life, and, in particular, I think we see what I call digital narcissism, this embrace of the self. It's Time magazine's person of the year for last year was you."[14] Keen is also heavily critical of anonymity on the Internet, believing that it makes users behave worse, not better. He says: "The Web's cherished anonymity can be a weapon as well as a shield."[15] Showing that misbehavior using anonymity has been so widely adopted, new definitions such as "
Criticism of social exhibitionism
In the book Digital Vertigo, Keen argues that the "hypervisibility" promoted by social networks like Facebook and Twitter traps users into sacrificing vitally important parts of the human experience, like privacy and solitude. He compares the experience of participating in modern social networks with Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, concluding that: "The future should be anything but social."[16]
He is not without his critics. Tim O'Reilly has said: "he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy to sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants."[17]
Criticism of the Internet
In his book The Internet Is Not the Answer, Keen presents the history of the internet and its impact on psychology, economy, and society.[18] He argues that the more the internet develops, the more detrimental it is to those who use it.[18]
Keen writes: "It is more like a negative feedback loop, a digital vicious cycle in which it is us, the Web's users, who are its victims rather than beneficiaries".[18] Keen goes on to argue that the internet has allowed for the emergence of "new, leviathan-like monopolists like Apple, Google, and Amazon," impeding economic competition and economic justice between the rich and poor.[18] Keen also argues that the internet encourages intolerance and that "rather than fostering a cultural renaissance, it has created a selfie-centered culture of voyeurism and narcissism".[18]
On the Digital Revolution
Published in 2018 by Grove Atlantic, Keen's most recent book How to Fix the Future deals about how societies need to address the challenges caused by the
According to Keen, there are five key tools to addressing the negative effects caused by the Digital Revolution, including changes in regulation, competitive innovation, social responsibility, education, and worker and consumer choice.[19]
Published works
- ISBN 9780385520805[20]
- Digital Vertigo, St. Martin's Press, 2012, ISBN 9780312624989[21]
- The Internet Is Not The Answer, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2015, ISBN 9780802123138[18]
- How to Fix the Future, Grove Atlantic, 2018, ISBN 9780802126641[19]
References
- ^ "Karlsruhe Dialogues 2011". zak.kit.ed. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). 31 January 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2011.
- ^ Saracevic, Alan T. (15 October 2006). Debate 2.0 / Weighing the merits of the new Webocracy. San Francisco Chronicle ("Age: 46")
- ^ "Q&A with Andrew Keen". C-Span. 15 January 2015. Retrieved 29 April 2015.
- ^ archive.org. andrewkeen.typepad.com. Archived from the originalon 28 February 2006. Retrieved 24 August 2011.
- ^ Balicki, Robert (21 February 2007). "Blogging Berkeley". The Daily Californian. Archived from the original on 16 March 2012. Retrieved 24 August 2011.
- ^ "Andrew Keen". netmag.co.uk. Archived from the original on 21 December 2007. Retrieved 3 January 2008.
- ^ futurecastseries.com
- ^ "Author: Andrew Keen". 15 April 2018.
- ^ Keen, Andrew (15 February 2006). "Web 2.0; The second generation of the Internet has arrived. It's worse than you think". The Weekly Standard. Archived from the original on 25 February 2006.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5.
- YouTube
- ISBN 978-0-385-52081-2.
- ^ Andrew Keen (5 June 2007). Authors@Google: Andrew Keen (SWF/FLV/Flash/h.264) ((Videotaped)). Google Headquarters in Mountain View: Google. Event occurs at 50:00. Archived from the original on 10 July 2011. Retrieved 24 August 2011.
- ^ New Book Looks at the Internet's Impact on American Life Archived 23 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine, PBS NewsHour.
- ISBN 978-0-385-52080-5.
- ^ Keen, Digital Vertigo page 193
- ^ Tim O'Reilly (7 April 2008). The Truth According to the Wikipedia (SWF/FLV/Flash/h.264) ((Documentary)). VPROinternational. Event occurs at 38:30. Retrieved 24 August 2011.
- ^ a b c d e f The Internet Is Not the Answer | Grove Atlantic. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
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ignored (help) - ^ a b c d e How to Fix the Future | Grove Atlantic. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
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ignored (help) - ^ The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen | PenguinRandomHouse.com.
- ^ "Digital Vertigo | Andrew Keen | Macmillan". US Macmillan. Archived from the original on 28 February 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
External links
- Official website
- Andrew Keen at IMDb
- Appearances on C-SPAN