I’ve just picked up The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture by Andrew Keen. I spotted the book at Borders and read the jacket copy, which surprised me in its ability to make me seethe with anger:
in a hard-hitting and provocative polemic…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 form the fabric of American achievement.
…
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 just strikes me as so, so…wrong. I figured this book will either piss me off or teach me something important, so I bought it.
(I also bought it just so I can blog about it. Windypundit is earning more than enough ad revenue to cover my hosting fees, so I’m going to use some of the income to buy stuff for me to blog about, like this book. That’s right, here at Windypundit we take the profits and plow them right back in to improve our product!)
What I Expect From This Book: Elitism. More to the point, unwarranted elitism. It’s one thing to be elitist when the subject is, say, one of the hard sciences where there are known facts and right answers. We listen to scientists and engineers because doing so produces useful results.
Elitism is not so easy to justify when the subject is something softer, such as art criticism or cultural commentary. I’ve never read a movie critic or book reviewer who I agreed with all the time. I suppose that could be because I’m an amateur, but not only don’t I agree with them, other critics don’t agree with them either. I rarely have this problem with astronomers or biologists.
Elitism is nearly useless when the subject is political and we can’t distinguish the elite commentator’s authority from his service to an agenda: George Bush and Barack Obama both are in a position to know more about the war in Iraq than I do, but that doesn’t mean I should believe either of them.
What I Hope Is In This Book: Something better than what I expect.
I have real reservations about things on the web. Forums and blog comment areas that become popular are too often overrun with trolls, spammers, and social cliques, and I have doubts about the ability of Wikipedia to stay useful as ever more people arrive who have reason to ruin it. (Of course, I thought that years ago, and so far I’ve been wrong.)
Web 2.0 proponents talk a lot about the advantages of self-organizing systems, but I’m not convinced that the web is built on good self-organizing principles.
I hope the book will surpass my prejudices and say something important and useful about the web.
Leave a Reply