There's an excellent point lurking in this book: that participatory Web 2.0 culture tends to drive out expertise and knowledge by making it financially unsupportable. Unfortunately, Keen argues his case so badly that the truth of this will be lost on many readers.
Keen's main argument is that participatory web culture - things like blogs, YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia - is creating a culture where no value is placed on actual knowledge, talent, training, or skill. And, he argues, a dot-com boom fueled by the creation of as many content platforms as possible that exist simply to allow users to broadcast themselves drives out the financial rewards for that skill and expertise.
Most importantly, Keen says, the idea that this results in worthwhile content, or is the "democratization" that Silicon Valley cultists like to talk about, is a fantasy.
I agree with him, as far as that goes. Unfortunately, the tirade he presents here is so flawed that even a sympathetic reader can see the problems with it. A few examples:
At times the book reads like a plea for sympathy for poor corporations that can't make a big profit off of music, video, and print content. I'm sorry, but pulling our heartstrings for Time Warner is not exactly an effective approach. Moreover, Keen completely glosses over the way these companies have accelerated their own demise. He's very eager to blame the music industry's woes on illegal downloading that's cut out the financial support for developing artists.
But his examples of what investment in artists can do relies on examples from decades ago (he talks about Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon, which - whether you like either album or not - clearly are examples of a record company spending the money to allow an artist to create a carefully crafted, well produced, cohesive album).
Of course, nothing like that has been happening for years. The music industry has been churning out derivative hits and the investment has been in marketing, not giving artists freedom to hone their craft, so they created a situation where their value no longer matched their price.
The same issue comes up with respect to the demise of independent bookstores. Yes, Amazon.com has been a very bad thing for them. Of course, Amazon isn't participatory web culture at all, but that doesn't bother Keen; Amazon is just a cost-cutting strategy.
And before Amazon, bookstore chains were doing the same thing. The problem isn't the internet; the internet is an accelerant here. The problem is the power of mass marketing, online or not.
Toward the end of the book, Keen goes off on a weird tangent regarding internet gambling and sex predators. Which are certainly things to be concerned about - but they don't relate to his central thesis, and he doesn't even try to make the connection. Instead we get facile statements about how badly-written laws like COPA should be enforced, glossing right over serious questions about appropriate limits on expression and the problems with a definition of "child pornography" that includes images that don't even include children.
But those are questions for serious people, and Keen establishes himself as a non-serious person here. Here's the rub, though; I think he's fundamentally right. It is not good for us, as a society, to see journalism struggling for financial survival while people get news from "citizen journalists" who don't actually investigate anything. It impoverishes us to have 3 million unsigned bands on MySpace releasing MP3s but not making enough money to buy food, but little financial supports for proven talents to do their work the way they used to.
I'm not anti-amateur - hello, I'm a blogger - but there is a role for the experts, the gatekeepers, the people who've invested in learning and developing skills.
I wish there were a better messenger delivering that news, though.
The Cult of the Amateur
at Amazon. Yes, he sells his book on Amazon. Go figure.
Al Gore is a smart man. He's right about a lot of what's wrong with the way our democracy functions (or malfunctions) now, and how the Bush administration and a toothless Congress have made things worse.
There's an excellent point lurking in this book: that participatory Web 2.0 culture tends to drive out expertise and knowledge by making it financially unsupportable. Unfortunately, Keen argues his case so badly that the truth of this will be lost on many readers.
Somehow I'd never read this Vonnegut novel; it's a funny, insightful critique of religion and human foibles, describing the creation of new religion that acknowledges that all religions are untrue, but useful for keeping people happy. Combine that with the human tendency toward self-destruction, and you've got Vonnegut at his best.
at Amazon.com
I became interested in this after hearing Raban on a segment of Christopher Lydon's Open Source radio program. This is not, as it claims to be, a novel; it's more of a sketch of American post-9/11 paranoia in a country where everybody's watching somebody, and being watched. It's interesting, and I found myself giving it the benefit of the doubt... right up to the last couple of pages, where Raban gives us a stagey non-ending. I can't say it was a waste of time, but I am glad I got it from the library instead of buying it.
