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The Cult of the Amateur
12 June 2009 |
| The Cult of the Amateur |
| Andrew Keen, Brealey, 2008, 240 pages, £9.99. |
| Are you ever so slightly afraid of the internet? Concerned that its disruptive power may overturn the established order, and even threaten the livelihoods of experienced professionals – people like you, perhaps? Then Andrew Keen has written a book that you will find both compelling and disturbing. |
| In the preface to the new edition of The Cult of the Amateur the author describes the outrage that greeted his book when it first came out. A friend’s prediction that he would become “the most hated man on the internet” was quickly borne out, and the French newspaper Liberation, summed up the view of his peers with the headline, “L’Antichrist de la Silicon Valley.” |
| Keen’s crime, in the eyes of Silicon Valley, is that he is a digital disciple turned heretic. An English-born web entrepreneur, he has now decided that much of the gospel of what has become known as Web 2.0 is dangerous and damaging nonsense. For true believers, the way the web has developed over the last five years has been profoundly liberating. New services like YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook have changed what was a ‘read-only’ experience into the ‘read-write’ web. In other words, the barriers between professionals and amateurs have been broken down, unleashing a flood of creativity in the form of ‘user-generated content’. |
| For Andrew Keen, though, this just means that professionals will see their work swamped under a wave of sub-standard amateurish bilge. He claims that the ranks of the cultural gatekeepers are being decimated: “Professional critics, journalists, editors, musicians, moviemakers and other purveyors of expert information are being replaced....by amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun moviemakers, and attic recording artists.” |
| So, Wikipedia has undermined the experts who write the Encyclopedia Britannica, bloggers like Arianna Huffington eat away at the fabric of fine old newspapers like the New York Times, and YouTube threatens the economics of Hollywood. It gets worse; there is even evidence that the professionals of Madison Avenue could be an endangered species, as marketing budgets are diverted towards cheap user-generated adverts. In a heart-breaking passage, Keen describes how brands like Frito-Lay and Chevrolet ran some of these cheap adverts during the 2007 Super Bowl, and works out that this saved them $331,000. “That’s $331,000 that wasn’t paid to professional filmmakers, scriptwriters, actors and marketing companies – $331,000 sucked out of the economy.” |
| That the economics of the internet threaten many old media businesses has become a truism but Keen fails to provide much evidence for his charge that it is the amateur who is elbowing aside the professional. He is on stronger ground when he questions the assumption in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail that the economics of web distribution will let a thousand flowers bloom, both professional and amateur. It seems more likely that the ‘hit’ system will reassert itself, with a just a few cultural products winning a big enough audience to sustain the livelihoods of their creators. |
| Having dealt with the dreadful scourge of amateurism, Keen widens his attack, and launches a general sideswipe at everything that is bad about the internet, from spam to viruses, from the assault on privacy to the threat from paedophiles and other predators. |
| Poor old Andrew Keen. His problem is that he has swallowed whole everything the Web 2.0 zealots have told him, and that is why he is so afraid. But the truth is a little more mundane. YouTube may well have unleashed a million shaky videos onto the web, but it has been gradually captured by professional content. The Arctic Monkeys might have got started on MySpace, but it took a big record label to make them megastars – and they also happen to be quite talented. Yes, it’s dreadful that ‘citizen journalists’ are trying to usurp the role of professional writers and broadcasters, but the public shows little appetite for their amateur material. So Andrew – calm down. The web revolution is proceeding but the ancien regime of cultural gatekeepers is fighting back. |
| Rory Cellan-Jones |
| Technology Correspondent, BBC |
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