"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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