Book Review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

I just finished reading Andrew Keen's 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur. The thesis of the book is that Web 2.0 technologies (think blogging, wikis, social networking, and file sharing) are undermining the cultural and economic institutions that, up until now, have made the world work. In particular, Keen's great phobia is a world where expert opinions are inaudible over the throng of amateurs shouting at each other.

To illustrate that point, Keen tells the story of Dr. William Connolley, a global warming researcher who was editing Wikipedia's "Global Warming" entry. Connolley's Wikipedia permissions were limited when another user (not a global warming researcher) complained that Connolley was "strongly pushing his POV with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own" (p. 43). Keen's view is that in the ensuing appeals process, the Wikipedia staff should have considered Connolley's expertise and rescinded their order limiting his permissions.

I guess there's something bothersome about the story. It's true that I find myself sympathizing with Connolley. If I wanted facts about global warming, I would trust what he told me more than what the complaining user told me; if the complaining user tried to interrupt his explication in polite conversation, I'd tell the user to shut it, because I'm trying to learn something. But at the end of the day, I just can't get all that riled up about this story. There are plenty of things that Wikipedia is good for, like looking up Bob Dylan's discography, or the average annual rainfall in Rio de Janeiro, or a diagram of a generic drilling rig. But I don't know anybody who thinks that Wikipedia is the place to go to learn the unassailable facts underlying a scientific controversy. Frankly, it probably won't even give you enough background to meaningfully describe the parameters of the debate. In short, the entry on Global Warming is not what Wikipedia is good for. Of course, maybe I'm overestimating people's ability to rationally rate the reliability of information on the web.

Keen makes similar arguments about blogs usurping the role of the traditional media. Again, maybe I'm behind the times, but I don't read blogs to get the news, I read them to get opinions. If a fact sounds fishy, I try to corroborate it at a reputable news site.

In other chapters, Keen takes on the future of music (there will be so much selection that you'll never be able to find anything you like), the future of the book (in which there really is only one text), as well as privacy concerns and the evils of Internet addiction. The book is at its best though when it begins to hint at a sort of malaise infecting the concept of authorship itself. Information technology has progressed to the point where every presently existing art form can be encoded in binary. And with disk space to store the ones and zeros, processors to manipulate them, and networks on which to share them, (what we now call) plagiarism runs rampant, and amateurish remixes and mashups abound.

When the barriers to entry were higher, when it was harder to get eyeballs on your work, only the most talented had any real incentive to try and get "published." Now though the Internet is an echo chamber of mediocrity: a lot of teenagers on Xanga posting their poetry, trolling other teenager's poems, and writing, "I like that - come read one of mine, and leave a comment!" The talented all of a sudden have less to aspire to, because it is harder to see that there is anything fine and glorious and noble left in the work of art.

But all those hard drives and processors and networks make this possible too, and I don't know that I would trade it. It's just that the paradigm of authorship is shifting, and I'm nostalgic for it before it's even all gone.

Anyway, The Cult of the Amateur is one of the more poorly reviewed books that I've ever looked at on Amazon. Maybe you can imagine that there would be a natural bias among online reviewers, but it really does have problems. There are good ideas in there, but they are somewhat inartfully expressed, and I found myself doing most of the mental heavy lifting when it came to organizing and analyzing Keen's ideas. The chapters on privacy and Internet addiction felt sort of tacked-on. Also, the tone in some places is extra curmudgeonly. I can't really recommend it very highly unless the topics interest you on their own; the writing alone will not be enough to hold your interest.