The Cult of the Amateur

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The Cult of the Amateur
ISBN
978-0-385-52080-5

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture is a 2007 book written by entrepreneur and Internet critic Andrew Keen. Published by Currency, Keen's first book is a critique of the enthusiasm surrounding user-generated content, peer production, and other Web 2.0–related phenomena.[1]

The book was based in part on a controversial essay Keen wrote for The Weekly Standard, criticizing Web 2.0 for being similar to Marxism, for destroying professionalism and for making it impossible to find high quality material amidst all of the user-generated web content.[1][2][3]

Contents

Keen argues against the idea of a

Disney that "create and produce movies, music, magazines, and television" with companies such as Google. He calls the latter "a parasite" since "it creates no content of its own" and "in terms of value creation, there is nothing there apart from its links."[4]

He elaborates on the point by saying, "Of course, every free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper. Every visit to Wikipedia's free information hive means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica." Thus, he concludes that "what is free is actually costing us a fortune." He also refers to changes such as downsizing of newspaper business and the closing of record labels as forms of economic loss caused by internet-based social changes.[4]

In her New York Times book review, Michiko Kakutani wrote:[1]

Mr. Keen argues that the democratized Web's penchant for

digital piracy
and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.

"What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune," Mr. Keen writes. "The new winners – Google,

MySpace
, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie – are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites 'aggregate'. Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave."

Keen quotes social philosopher Jürgen Habermas about the internet and related technologies: "The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." Keen states that most of modern social culture has existed with specific gatekeepers analyzing and regulating information as it reaches the masses. He views this expert-based filtering process as beneficial, improving the quality of popular discourse, and argues that it is being circumvented.[4]

He also criticizes the ability of the Internet to promote social harms such as gambling and pornography.[1] He writes, "It's hardly surprising that the increasingly tasteless nature of such self-advertisements have resulted in social networking sites becoming infested with anonymous sexual predators and pedophiles." He sees "cultural standards and moral values" as "at stake" due to new media innovations.[5]

More broadly, Keen remarks that "history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise" and argues against the notion that mass participation in ideas improve their quality. He highlights that popular opinion has supported "slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush's war in Iraq, [and] Britney Spears" among other things. He warns against a future of "when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule."[1]

Reviews and reception

Author Andrew Keen

The book received mixed reviews. Some traditional sources gave the book positive or neutral reviews,[1] while the book received generally negative reactions from bloggers.[6] Michiko Kakutani's New York Times book review called it "a shrewdly argued jeremiad", saying that the book "is eloquent on the fallout that free, user-generated materials is having on traditional media." She wrote that the author "wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book" but broadly "writes with acuity and passion".[1]

Lawrence Lessig, who was criticized in both the original essay and in the book, wrote an extremely negative review of the book in which he listed what he stated were a multitude of errors in the book including mischaracterizations of Lessig's views and work.[4] Lessig also set up a wiki where users could collaborate in listing problems with the book.[4][7]

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of the expert-centered wiki Citizendium, gave the book a mixed review. Sanger said that "The book is provocative, but its argument is unfortunately weakened by the fact that Keen is so over-the-top and presents more of a caricature of a position than carefully reasoned discourse." He said that it was hypocritical for Keen to express support for Citizendium, for incorporating expert opinion, when the inherent point of the project is to supply free content, which Keen so opposes in principle. Sanger stated that the book "combines several different criticisms of Web 2.0, incoherently, under the rubric of 'the cult of the amateur'" but the book "is a much-needed Web 2.0 reality check".[8][9] Tim O'Reilly commented in response to the book, "I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy and sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants."[10] Furthermore, he has said in response to the book, "I think the Internet is often held to another standard. You don't say, 'Why aren't the newspapers writing about Bismarck, he is more important than Pamela Anderson.' But people will say that about Wikipedia. It's just bias."[10]

Volunteered Geographic Information.[12][13]

Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska noted that Keen failed to distinguish between for-profit and non-profit aspects of the amateur participation (platform capitalism represented by companies such as Uber or Airbnb vs commons-based peer production represented by communities such as Wikipedia or Linux). They further note that Keen assumes that there is always a stark difference between quality of work produced by professionals and amateurs, which is not always the case. Keen's criticism is valid if the end result is low quality product that drives the higher quality product out of existence, but a number of products of the amateur community have been shown to be of comparable quality to professional products, and have been offered for a cheaper price, or completely free.[14]

Jarvis–Keen debate

Jeff Jarvis, who had previously called the original essay in The Weekly Standard "snobs.com," was challenged to a debate over Web 2.0 issues.[5][15] Jarvis held a discussion on his blog about whether he should debate Keen and then decided to accept the offer.[3][5]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Kakutani, Michiko (June 29, 2007). "The Cult of the Amateur". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 5, 2011. Retrieved February 12, 2023.
  2. ^ Keen, Andrew (February 15, 2006). "Web 2.0". The Weekly Standard. Archived from the original on 4 December 2010. Retrieved February 12, 2023.
  3. ^ a b "Amateur Internet". The Globe and Mail. Toronto. June 6, 2007. Archived from the original on February 27, 2009. Retrieved February 12, 2023.
  4. ^
    Lessig, Larry (2007-05-31). "Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur": BRILLIANT!". Archived from the original
    on November 1, 2007. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
  5. ^ a b c Jarvis, Jeff (2007-05-10). "Your advice: Should I debate?". BuzzMachine. Archived from the original on May 11, 2010. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
  6. ^ Auchard, Eric (June 5, 2007). "Amateur charge infuriates blogosphere". Toronto. Archived from the original on August 4, 2009. Retrieved February 12, 2023.
  7. ^ "TheKeenReader". Lessig.org (Larry Lessig). Archived from the original on 2008-05-24. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
  8. ^ "Citizendium Blog". Archived from the original on August 25, 2007. Retrieved 7 October 2014.
  9. ^ Ritzer, G. and Jurgenson, N., 2010. Production, Consumption, Prosumption The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital 'prosumer'. Journal of consumer culture, 10(1), pp.13-36.
  10. ^ a b VPRO (2007-07-17). "The Truth According To Wikipedia". Wikipedia. VPRO. Archived from the original on 2008-04-18. Retrieved 2008-08-20.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link) The title derives from words spoken by Tim O'Reilly at 38:00 in this video.
  11. PMID 18675478. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 2011-12-16. Retrieved 2011-04-28.
  12. ^ Parker, C.J., May, A.J. and Mitchell, V. (2014), "User-centred design of neogeography: the impact of volunteered geographic information on users' perceptions of online map 'mashups'.", Ergonomics, Vol. 57 No. 7, pp. 987–97.
  13. ^ Brown, M., Sharples, S., Harding, J., Parker, C.J., Bearman, N., Maguire, M., Forrest, D., et al. (2013), "Usability of Geographic Information: Current challenges and future directions", Applied Ergonomics, Applied Ergonomics: Special Issue GI Data Usability, Vol. 44 No. 6, pp. 855–865.
  14. ISBN 978-0-262-35645-9
    .
  15. ^ Jarvis, Jeff (2006-02-18). "Snobs.com". BuzzMachine. Retrieved 2008-08-20.
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