The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

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 labours. 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.

Andrew Keen is a well-known and divisive observer on the digital revolution around the world. Cult of the Amateur, Digital Vertigo, and The Internet Is Not The Solution are his three prior publications. He's also a serial digital entrepreneur who's launched a number of companies, including Audiocafe, AfterTV, and Futurecast, a Silicon Valley innovation salon.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385520805
ISBN 10	0385520808
Title	The Cult of the Amateur
Author	Andrew Keen
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Transworld Publishers Ltd
Year published	2007-08-17
Number of pages	228
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.