Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music startup Audiocafe is creating quite the sensation with his new book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture”.
One reviewer summarizes Keen’s arguments: “that many of the ideas promoted by champions of web 2.0 are gravely flawed. Instead of creating masterpieces, the millions of exuberant monkeys are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity: uninformed political commentary, unseemly home videos, embarrassingly amateurish music, unreadable poems, essays and novels.”
Another writes “The villains in Keen’s narrative are a “pajama army” of mostly anonymous writers who spread gossip and scandal, “intellectual kleptomaniacs,” who search Google to copy others’ work and the “digital thieves” of media content in the post-Napster era.”
“Instead of a dictatorship of experts, we’ll have a dictatorship of idiots,” says Keen.
Of course the blogging world is not taking this lying down. In fact you can check Keen’s own blog on how the battle is going. It’s hilarious.
July 10, 2007 at 7:54 am
[...] Change and China July 9th, 2007 — Fred Fortin In Andrew Keen’s new book “The Cult of the Amateur” he complains that the internet is transforming our culture into a cacophony of “infinite [...]
July 12, 2007 at 5:57 pm
[...] on the traditional press — as well as on political and civic discourse (see earlier posts here and here) — comes a new thoughtful volume by Scott Gant, “We’re All Journalist Now.” [...]