The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today's user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values | 
 enlarge | Author: Andrew Keen
Publisher: Doubleday Business
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  104 reviews
Sales Rank: 160966
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0385520816
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9780385520812
ASIN: 0385520816
Publication Date: August 12, 2008
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Product Description
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 rein 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 99 more reviews...
 5 Stars for Topic, 0 Stars for Arguments October 13, 2008
5 stars for finding a controversial current-event topic (Internet and the Major Media) and taking a stance on the issue; but no stars for the stance taken- the arguments and conclusions seem like afterthoughts.
It is an ironic title- since the same complaints have been made against the professional media for decades...
To have to sit here and feel the need to defend reality from the book does not make the book good, but tragic... the title along requires several immediate responses:
On Why People Lost Faith in the Professional Media: Professional Trash
Entertainment: What is the most popular video on Youtube? Avril Lavigne's teen-date music video (which I would classify as horribly obnoxious, psychologically damaging, narcissistically retarded, and professionally-done).
Journalism: Look at the deplorable state of professional journalism- the search for the 'new and unusual' had been reduced to presenting the 'sick and twisted'; political journalists think agenda, deception, and just plain-old brainwashing through hidden bias and control of exposure are their holy calling;
Science: why do you think a discovery is reported one day and disproved the next? We've been taught to propose a hypothesis, and let someone else disprove it. Or how about when nerds get their arms twisted by political thugs, and suddenly 'come to a consensus' (which is not science)...
On Why People Lost Faith in Professionalism- Innovation and Exploitation:
In the world of ideas and art (the world of the Web), innovation is nearly exclusive to the amateur world. Professionals appear later, borrowing, refining, marketing, buying out, glossing up, and overdoing a concept until it dies a slow, painful, outdated death. Then, when the next fresh, amateur creation comes along, it is professionally exploited to death likewise.
On Developing a Critical Eye:
With the Internet, we are `treated' to all the lousy garbage which the book says the professional industry would shield us from (which it doesn't, see Point 1 above); as a result, we must develop our own critical eyes and minds, digging through the mountain ranges of terrible fare to find a nugget of gold. That isn't completely a bad thing; we are forced to become analytical and resourceful.
Example- I visit a music composition site with posts from rank amateurs; but worse, there are some untrained, unskilled, pompous pretenders among them with no compensating talent or taste, who post unimaginably terrible scores, calling their abominations "symphonies" and "concertos" and similarly degrading other respected terms with cheap con-artist attempts to be called a composer. After listening to such excruciatingly bad creations, however, I developed a new insight into and appreciation of Beethoven, which I would never have acquired without having put myself through such tortuous ordeals and gaining such a hard-won perspective; professional training does not offer anything like it...
On the Economy: If money isn't in government hands, it is in the economy; the author is for big-government, thereby negating his purported concern for the economy...
On Copyright Infringement and Pirating- young people do it because they have no money. When they grow up they will have the money for immediate purchases, but not the time or patience to wait for file-sharing downloads, which already have the stigma of kidstuff...
On Cults: to sit there and listen to someone call the Internet a cult when it is a worldwide phenomenon habited by people sick of the low standards of the professional media, who the author touts, and from whom Internet abusers get their leads, is too much.
On Government Regulations: Go regulate your poodle, the Internet doesn't need it, I don't need it, you obviously think you don't need it, in any case the abusers and frauds on the Internet will be confronted and exposed by the average sensibilities of the common man. The government cannot protect every wanton gullible fruitcake on the planet.
 First critical Web 2.0 book October 2, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Anyone involved in Web 2.0 should find this book useful, in particular two groups: 1)those who own big Web 2.0 companies and 2)those who are dreaming of making millions by setting up a Web 2.0 company.
GOOD: we tend to see only the advantages of the Web 2.0 trend while neglecting the negative stuff. here, the author those a great job highlighting some of the major drawbacks of this trend. a few ==>>: there are some major problems with the overload of blogs, overload of information and half truths. many video clips on the web are not for kids. Wikipedia is brilliant, but you need to be aware of potential missinformation in articles. old media might be corrupt, but so is potentially new media. does 50m members on a platfform justify a valuation in the 100's of millions!?
BAD: the author forgets that the only constant in this world is change. industries emerge and decline. he condems the pirating of music and the ability of buying only selected songs rather than the whole album. all this leads to the decline of the traditional music industry which again leads to less paid musicians which then leads to less quality of music. true? maybe. probably yes. so? that's exactly what change means in an industry. it gets smaller or even destroyed and something new arises. the author sounds like he'd love to protect the music industry. protecting music bosses who got insanily rich in this business? musicians who make USD 50m or more a year? musicians who are worth USD 800m while not being forty. dear Mr Keen, many people would disagree with you and not protect them.
 Good Style and Dubious Content September 3, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Keen's argument--that the Web 2.0 is driven by a Marxist and radical 1960s counter culture ideology and is doomed by these ideologies' shortcomings--is bogus and impossible to support with any empirical evidence. People who are driving Web 2.0 are not ideologues, as Keen would have us believe, but entrepreneurs. In other words, they want to make money.
However, Keen would like to equate the millions of blogs that are born from Web 2.0 with Marxism in order to push his own conservative worldview. In logic, we call this Procrustean thinking, forcing an argument to fit your worldview.
No one said that most blogs are good. A few will rise to the top and we will have to struggle to find the good ones. That's a fair point. But to say that the dumbed down blogs are driven from Marxism and counter cultural ideas from the 1960s is laughable.
What's ironic is that Keen talks about the "Great Seduction" of blogs but the real not so great "seduction" is his fine prose style collapsing under the weight of his Procrustean thinking.
 Give some credit to the "user" August 26, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Mr. Keen's book assumes that proponents of Web 2.0 desire the end of traditional media. Not correct. They are a part of the "new" Internet.
Finally, Mr. Keen does not give any credit to the reader of "Web 2.0" information. Yes, we see a lot of trash on the Net. However, we weed it out and read only the valuable information. And, there's a lot of it. In fact, too much.
No doubt, we need to be better editors -- in real-time and better writers.
Our culture could use a good killing. August 23, 2008
Once, I read an article bemoaning the closure of the many seaside amusement parks that dotted American coastlines for almost a century until the early 1900s. It reminded me how much I hate cotten candy. Even though jobs were lost and costal towns were left with acres of industrial wreckage and abandoned piers to bargain with, I'm not too bothered that my kids aren't begging me to take them there.
This treatment on the effects of "Web 2.0" on our culture is kind of like that. The record industry and their well funded lobbying group loves to rave about the detrimental effects of music piracy. The author makes enough tenderly worded epitaphs to satisfy them all, but I'd rather listen to Radioheads internet-released "In Rainbows" than spend any more time throwing money at those clowns. Bob Dylan knew the times were a-changing 40 years ago. "Admit that the waters around you have grown, and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone," and don't waste any time with this one.
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