''The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture'' is a 2007 book written by entrepreneur and
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
critic
Andrew Keen
Andrew Keen (born c. 1960Saracevic, Alan T. (15 October 2006)Debate 2.0 / Weighing the merits of the new Webocracy.''San Francisco Chronicle'' ("Age: 46")) is a British-American entrepreneur and author. He is particularly known for his view tha ...
. Published by
Currency
A currency, "in circulation", from la, currens, -entis, literally meaning "running" or "traversing" is a standardization of money in any form, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, for example banknotes and coins.
A more general ...
, Keen's first book is a
critique
Critique is a method of disciplined, systematic study of a written or oral discourse. Although critique is commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgment,Rodolphe Gasché (2007''The honor of thinking: critique, theory, philosophy''p ...
of the enthusiasm surrounding
user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, testimonials, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media, discussion f ...
,
peer production Peer production (also known as mass collaboration) is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the labor of many people is coordinated towards a shared outcome.
Overview
...
, and other
Web 2.0
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...
–related phenomena.
The book was based in part on a controversial essay Keen wrote for ''
The Weekly Standard
''The Weekly Standard'' was an American neoconservative political magazine of news, analysis and commentary, published 48 times per year. Originally edited by founders Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes, the ''Standard'' had been described as a "re ...
'', criticizing Web 2.0 for being similar to
Marxism
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
, for destroying professionalism and for making it impossible to find high quality material amidst all of the user-generated web content.
[ ]
Contents
Keen argues against the idea of a
read-write culture in media, stating that "most of the content being shared – no matter how many times it has been linked, cross-linked, annotated, and copied – was composed or written by someone from the sweat of their creative brow and the disciplined use of their talent." As such, he contrasts companies such as
Time Warner
Warner Media, LLC ( traded as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City, United States.
It was originally established in 1972 by ...
and
Disney
The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
that "create and produce movies, music, magazines, and television" with companies such as
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
. He calls the latter "a parasite" since "it creates no content of its own" and "in terms of value creation, there is nothing there apart from its links."
[
He elaborates on the point by saying, "Of course, every free listing on ]Craigslist
Craigslist (stylized as craigslist) is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.
Craig Newmark began the ...
means one less paid listing in a local newspaper. Every visit to Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
's free information hive means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as '' Britannica''." Thus, he concludes that "what is free is actually costing us a fortune." He also refers to changes such as downsizing of newspaper business and the closing of record label
A record label, or record company, is a brand or trademark of music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a publishing company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the produ ...
s as forms of economic loss caused by internet-based social changes.[
In her ''New York Times'' book review, ]Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for ''The New York Times'' from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Early life ...
wrote:[
]Mr. Keen argues that the democratized Web's penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threaten not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...
. He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges. And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy
Copyright infringement (at times referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, su ...
and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.
"What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune," Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners – Google, YouTube
YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie – are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites 'aggregate.' Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave."
Keen quotes social philosopher Jürgen Habermas about the internet and related technologies: "The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." Keen states that most of modern social culture has existed with specific gatekeeper
A gatekeeper is a person who controls access to something, for example via a city gate or bouncer, or more abstractly, controls who is granted access to a category or status. Gatekeepers assess who is "in or out", in the classic words of manage ...
s analyzing and regulating information as it reaches the masses. He views this expert-based filtering process as beneficial, improving the quality of popular discourse, and argues that it is being circumvented.[
He also criticizes the ability of the Internet to promote social harms such as ]gambling
Gambling (also known as betting or gaming) is the wagering of something of value ("the stakes") on a random event with the intent of winning something else of value, where instances of strategy are discounted. Gambling thus requires three el ...
and pornography.[ He writes, "It’s hardly surprising that the increasingly tasteless nature of such self-advertisements have resulted in social networking sites becoming infested with anonymous sexual predators and pedophiles." He sees "cultural standards and moral values" as "at stake" due to new media innovations.][
More broadly, Keen remarks that "history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise" and argues against the notion that mass participation in ideas improve their quality. He highlights that popular opinion has supported "slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, ndBritney Spears” among other things. He warns against a future of "when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets ]mob rule
Mob rule or ochlocracy ( el, ὀχλοκρατία, translit=okhlokratía; la, ochlocratia) is the rule of government by a mob or mass of people and the intimidation of legitimate authorities. Insofar as it represents a pejorative for majori ...
."[
]
Reviews and reception
The book received mixed reviews. Some traditional sources gave the book positive or neutral reviews [ ]Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for ''The New York Times'' from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Early life ...
's ''New York Times'' book review called it "a shrewdly argued jeremiad
A jeremiad is a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in verse, in which the author bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and always contains a prophecy of society's imminen ...
", saying that the book "is eloquent on the fallout that free, user-generated materials is having on traditional media." She wrote that the author "wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book" but broadly "writes with acuity and passion".[
]Lawrence Lessig
Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...
, who was criticized in both the original essay and in the book, wrote an extremely negative review of the book in which he listed what he stated were a multitude of errors in the book including mischaracterizations of Lessig's views and work. Lessig also set up a wiki where users could collaborate in listing problems with the book.
Larry Sanger
Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...
, co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of the expert-centered wiki Citizendium
Citizendium ( ; "the citizens' compendium of everything") is an English-language wiki-based free online encyclopedia launched by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Nupedia and Wikipedia.
It was first announced in September 2006 as a fork of the Engli ...
, gave the book a mixed review. Sanger said that "The book is provocative, but its argument is unfortunately weakened by the fact that Keen is so over-the-top and presents more of a caricature of a position than carefully reasoned discourse." He said that it was hypocritical for Keen to express support for Citizendium, for incorporating expert opinion, when the inherent point of the project is to supply free content, which Keen so opposes in principle. Sanger stated that the book "combines several different criticisms of Web 2.0, incoherently, under the rubric of 'the cult of the amateur'" but the book "is a much-needed Web 2.0 reality check". Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.
Education and early life
Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, C ...
commented in response to the book, "I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy and sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants."[ The title derives from words spoken by ]Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.
Education and early life
Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, C ...
at 38:00 in this video. Furthermore, he has said in response to the book, "I think the Internet is often held to another standard. You don't say, 'Why aren't the newspapers writing about Bismarck, he is more important than Pamela Anderson
Pamela Denise Anderson (born July 1, 1967) is a Canadian-American actress and model. She is best known for her glamour modeling work in ''Playboy'' magazine and for her appearances on the television series ''Baywatch'' (1992–1997).
Anders ...
.' But people will say that about Wikipedia. It's just bias."[
Anthony Trewavas, professor at the Institute of Molecular Plant Science at the ]University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...
, discussed the book in an article in '' Trends in Biotechnology''. Trewavas wrote that Keen's "concern is the blurring of the distinction between the qualified and informed professional and the uninformed and unqualified amateur", expressing concerns that this social change can hold back agricultural development. Trewavas stated as well, "in agriculture, pesticides, food and farming, expert scientific knowledge and experience is seemingly regarded as having no more weight than that of the opinionated, unqualified (and inexperienced) environmentalist." The book has also been discussed in academic publications negatively, expressing how Keen has considered the worst aspects of a complex social movement while ignoring the demonstrable benefits that have been brought through initiatives such as OpenStreetMap, an expression of Volunteered Geographic Information.[Brown, M., Sharples, S., Harding, J., Parker, C.J., Bearman, N., Maguire, M., Forrest, D., et al. (2013), “Usability of Geographic Information: Current challenges and future directions”, Applied Ergonomics, Applied Ergonomics: Special Issue GI Data Usability, Vol. 44 No. 6, pp. 855–865.]
Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska noted that Keen failed to distinguish between for-profit and non-profit aspects of the amateur participation (platform capitalism
Platform capitalism refers to the activities of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb and others to operate as platforms. In this business model both hardware and software are used as a foundation (platform) for other a ...
represented by companies such as Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), packa ...
or Airbnb
Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 b ...
vs commons-based peer production
Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-based ...
represented by communities such as Wikipedia or Linux). They further note that Keen assumes that there is always a stark difference between quality of work produced by professionals and amateurs, which is not always the case. Keen's criticism is valid if the end result is low quality product that drives the higher quality product out of existence, but a number of products of the amateur community have been shown to be of comparable quality to professional products, and have been offered for a cheaper price, or completely free.
Jarvis–Keen debate
Jeff Jarvis
Jeff Jarvis (born July 15, 1954) is an American journalist, associate professor, public speaker and former television critic. He advocates the Open Web and argues that there are many social and personal benefits to living a more public life on ...
, who had previously called the original essay in ''The Weekly Standard'' "snobs.com," was challenged to a debate over Web 2.0 issues. Jarvis held a discussion on his blog about whether he should debate Keen and then decided to accept the offer.[
]
See also
* Economic effects of Wikipedia
* Media criticism
* Reliability of Wikipedia
The reliability of Wikipedia concerns the validity, verifiability, and veracity of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition. It is written and edited by volunteer editors who generate online ...
* ''Amusing Ourselves to Death
''Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business'' (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on Geo ...
''
* '' An Army of Davids''
* "Is Google Making Us Stupid?
''Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains!'' (alternatively ''Is Google Making Us Stoopid?'') is a magazine article by technology writer Nicholas G. Carr, and is highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition ...
"
* '' The Global Trap''
* ''The Wisdom of Crowds
''The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations'', published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, ...
''
References
External links
Excerpt from Keen's blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cult of the Amateur, The
2007 non-fiction books
Books about the Internet
Books about Wikipedia
Popular culture books
Web 2.0
Doubleday (publisher) books