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The Cult of the Amateur
Andrew Keen
How today's Internet is killing our culture
Currency
June 2007
On Sale: June 5, 2007
240 pages
ISBN: 0385520808
EAN: 9780385520805
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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