The Cult of the Amateur The Cult of the Amateur

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

    • 3.8 • 4 Ratings
    • $4.99
    • $4.99

Publisher 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 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.

GENRE
Nonfiction
RELEASED
2007
June 5
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
240
Pages
PUBLISHER
Crown
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
615.3
KB

Customer Reviews

jhmgnv ,

Digital Conservatism

This book is a long-winded rant about how real culture and art are those produced by historical greats, and modern creativity by “amateurs” is useless garbage. Keen primarily complains of all the money that isn’t going to big established businesses and artists, and he has no appreciation for the fact that more than ever before, people are engaging in art and culture, as observers and as participants.

Ultimately, it is a digital conservatism manifesto: respect the old authorities, fear all new ideas and changes to the system, and don’t worry if the old system favored one group over another; inequality is good.

More Books Like This

The People's Platform The People's Platform
2014
We the Media We the Media
2006
Trust Me, I'm Lying Trust Me, I'm Lying
2012
The Digital Divide The Digital Divide
2011
Status Update Status Update
2013
Untangling the Web Untangling the Web
2013

More Books by Andrew Keen

Digital Vertigo Digital Vertigo
2012
The Internet Is Not the Answer The Internet Is Not the Answer
2015
How to Fix the Future How to Fix the Future
2018
Knowledge and information Knowledge and information
2021
How to fix the future - How to fix the future -
2018
Man and Technology Man and Technology
2022