Hullo fellow NLanders.....

I have been thinking of creating this thread for a while now. This Book is a must read for all internet users and lovers of the Web 2.0 revolution. This a review of the book "Cult of the Amateur-How today's Internet is Killing our Culture". The book is available on Amazon.com, for those who want to read the entire content. I have provided video links for better an easy comprehension of the topic.

I want to use this opportunity to appreciate the contributions of my course-mates who contributed immensely in this review. To my esteemed readers and analysts, Enjoy!!!



Please read and share!!!


BOOK TITLE: CULT OF THE AMATEUR (How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture
Author: Andrew Keene

About the Author: Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose writings on culture, media and technology

have appeared in top national dailies of the world. He is the founder of and Chief Executive Officer of Audiocafe.com. He

is also the host of the acclaimed internet show, AfterTv and frequently appears on radio and television. Keene lives in

Berkeley, California.
About the Book: Cult of the Amateur is a two hundred and forty-two (242) paged book, which is divided into eight (

chapters, with further notes and acknowledgments/index. It was published in the United States of America in 2007 by

Doubleday, an imprint of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. With the ISBN Serial No: 978-0-385-52080-5.

INTRODUCTION

Andrew Keene compares the pre-internet age, with today’s technology world where he draws an analogy of T.H. Huxley’s scenario of infinite monkeys empowered with infinite technology seemed more like a mathematical jest than a dystopian

vision.
Keen emphasizes the consequences of a flattening of culture that is blurring the lines between traditional audience and
author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur. In the Cult of the Amateur, Keen reveals the world of Web 2.0 where

amateur internet users are likened to monkeys. These amateurs with less talent in the creative arts, rather than creating

masterpieces for online consumption, are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity. He gives examples such as wikis (Wikipedia), blogs, YouTube, search engines (Google) and many more. He explained that blogging has become an

obsession, such that a new blog is created every second of every minute of every hour of every day.

See: The Internet_ http://www.ajkeen.com/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lV3YRJKLq8

The nature of blogging according to Keen is centered on the personal lives of individuals which exemplifies their amateurism. He affirmed this by stating that the New York Times reports that 50 percent of all bloggers blog for the sole

purpose of reporting and sharing experiences about their personal lives. The number of blogs has increased exponentially since then. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite that they have undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary.


The emergence of social media sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has led to the proliferation of amateurs.
More interestingly, old media is facing extinction due to the activities of individuals on the internet competing with mainstream media for the audience attention. As traditional mainstream media is replaced by a personalized one.

Amateurs are creating contents through wikis (Wikipedia), blogs, YouTube and generating advert revenue. Similarly, the profits of major mainstream media like newspaper companies (New York Times Company) in the world have plummeted as a result of the technologies of Web 2.0. Some of these companies faced financial challenges in such a manner that they at one point laid off their workers. The rise of YouTube has posed a major threat to the sales of movies by Hollywood, thereby reducing their revenue.

In the Cult of the Amateur, non-professionals have become experts, authors, producers, editors, and cultural gatekeepers as the audience crave for more and more information. As the nature of audience interest determines the type of content generated.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=giuKW5ELWeE

CHAPTER ONE – The Great Seduction
In this chapter, Keen’s analysis of the concept of Web 2.0 generally describes him as a pessimist who sees nothing good in Internet revolution. He thrashed the subject matter on the ‘Cost of Democratization’. He stated that “because democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, sourcing civic discourse, and belittling expertise, experience and talent, it is threatening the very future of our cultural institutions.” This he referred to as “the Great Seduction”. He argues that those of us who want to know more about the world, those of us who are the consumers of mainstream culture are being seduced by the empty promise of the “democratized” media. “For the real consequence of the is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information.”

Keen provided many instances to prove that the internet rather to be a blessing to humanity, has negatively affected us culturally, economically and intellectually. According to Keen, what the World Wide Web (WWW) is giving us today is a ‘superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment’. Before this, Keen had described how he left the family of the internet geek to become an ‘Unbeliever’ of the Internet cult due to his experience in the FOO camp. Keen explained that the Web 2.0 revolution has left content creation to amateurs who have no professional qualification to understand the nitty-gritty of news production, article writing, and moviemaking. This according to him has in all ramifications relegated experts in this field to the background.

However, Keen’s definition of whom an ‘expert’ is vague. He sees an expert as someone who possesses an academic qualification in a particular field or subject matter. While according to the English dictionary, an expert is a ‘person with extensive knowledge or ability in a given subject’. On the Web 2.0, there are a lot of the so called ‘amateur’ who possess extensive knowledge in what they are doing without having an academic qualification. Are these people also amateur?

This goes a long way to prove right Keen’s subjective analysis of the Web 2.0. From Keen’s choice of word in this chapter, one is likely to see a contradiction in his inability to present an argument and stick with it without diversion. Keen’s comparison of the internet users with the “Infinite monkey concept” intensively reveals the deliberate misrepresentation present in his book. Even when Keen tried to praise some of the beneficiary features of the Web 2.0, he ended satisfying his “unbeliever ego” he has on the coming of the Web 2.0. According to the Monkey Theorem, “if you provide infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters, some monkey somewhere will eventually create a masterpiece”. But Keen argued that instead of creating masterpieces, these internet amateurs are creating an “endless digital forest of mediocrity”. This is also not true. One cannot deny the fact the Web 2.0 has led to more fact been available to users. Information is being quickly denied and confirmed via Web 2.0. Day in day out, masterpieces is being created on the internet. Duo, Keen maybe right in some of his argument, however his stance on the use of the product of Web 2.0 like Blog, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube and his comparison of the traditional media to these Internet site is somewhat out of place. According to him, the traditional media has professional gatekeepers who edit content before publishing making the content generated a perfect example of artistic presentation, while in the Web 2.0, everybody is a content producer, an editor and a publisher producing propaganda as true information. Keene may have forgotten to tell us that the issue of false information, rumour and propaganda started and spread wide with the use of these traditional media. These media aided the spread of propaganda and false information without giving the people the means to resist it.

However, even though Web 2.0 has its own share of blame here, it has made lot of false information and propaganda to be busted than the traditional media who has the so called ‘expert’ as gatekeepers. Therefore, Keen’s qualification of the Web 2.0 as comprising ‘amateur writers, amateur producers, amateur technicians, and amateur audience” further shows the author personal bias in the whole book who sees nothing good in the internet revolution.