The Blogosphere is up in arms over Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur. Keen deliberately set out to tweak the mavens of Web 2.0 – and he is succeeding. This is great fun to witness, because said mavens often have all the self-righteousness of revolutionaries, at least when it comes to the virtues of Web 2.0, and are thus eminently tweakable.
Keen decries everything that he imagines to be wrong with the internet – especially the mediocre work of amateurs. Free but substandard content is apparently destroying whole industries, particularly our culture industries. He hates the fact that so much of today’s internet content is collaborative and distributed. The so-called wisdom of crowds is itself an “extraordinary popular delusion”, he says; the best work comes from the individual, professional mind. Anonymity coupled with anarchy leads to myriad abuses, from the corporate gaming of YouTube to “moral disorder”.
The book is provocative, but Keen’s over-the-top presentation weakens his argument, which is more a caricature of a position than a carefully reasoned discourse. The book is often well written, presenting thought-provoking arguments and entertaining factoids, but it is also full of non-sequiturs, simplistic narrative, and outright inaccuracies. Still, maybe a bit of deliberate provocation is needed in the public dialogue about today’s internet culture. Something more staid might not generate as lively a reaction or get people talking about issues that badly need to be discussed. In short, the book is a much-needed reality check for Web 2.0.
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Why is Keen so averse to the eponymous “cult of the amateur”? This uncritical, militantly amateuristic band of content creators and their free and mediocre productions are, according to Keen, putting the jobs of professionals at risk. Our splendid western culture – Keen is perhaps at his least persuasive in singing its praises – is the creation of well-paid professionals. Unpaid amateurs are undoing this culture in the space of a generation. Blogs are threatening professional journalism, Wikipedia is undermining reference book publishing, and YouTube is imposing on movies and TV.
The problem with Web 2.0, however, isn’t the prevalence of amateurs. I see little proof that amateur, user-generated content is threatening jobs. The industry perhaps most visibly damaged by the internet has been journalism. But this is largely because we can get most of our professionally created news free of charge online – provided by the same industry that is suffering layoffs.
True enough, Craigslist and other free classified services also cut into a large part of the newspaper business, but I’d say that we should celebrate the fact that such a useful, largely self-organising service can be free. This technological advance is bound to cause some economic upheaval; that’s the price of progress. Craigslist can’t be sensibly criticised for weakening the business model of newspapers if it delivers a better product than tiny ads on newsprint.
So how does Keen propose we solve our Web 2.0 woes? The first “solution” he refers to is a new website I have started called , or the Citizens’ Compendium, which I like to describe as Wikipedia with editors and real names. But how can Citizendium be a solution to the problems Keen raises if it has experts working without pay and the result is free? If it succeeds, won’t it too contribute to the decline of reference book publishing?
The biggest problem with this book is that Keen combines several different criticisms of Web 2.0, incoherently, under the rubric of “the cult of the amateur”, and in the final chapter, retracts many of his earlier accusations. Having explained how many internet phenomena are less than miraculous, he enthuses, “Digital technology is a miraculous thing, giving us the means to globally connect and share knowledge in unprecedented ways.” Free content, volunteerism, collaboration, anonymity and decentralisation make Web 2.0 a “miraculous thing” – and we are quickly discovering that the miracle can be had without the “cult of the amateur”. Keen himself seems to admit this. Maybe he’s not such a reactionary after all.
The Cult of the Amateur
Doubleday
