The Cult of the Amateur

How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture

De: Andrew Keen

Narrado por: Andrew Keen

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 labors.

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.

©2007 Andrew Keen (P)2007 Audible, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Andrew Keen is a brilliant, witty, classically-educated technoscold, and thank goodness. The world needs an intellectual Goliath to slay Web 2.0's army of Davids." (The Weekly Standard)
"Mr. Keen...writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred." (The New York Times)

hard to swallow

Very abrasive and insulting, yet thought provoking.

Great Book

Well read by the author. Very informative.
Highly recommended. A must read for those who put a lot of faith in web 2.0.

6 hours and 22 minutes of ranting

I forced myself to listen through the 6 hours and 22 minutes of ranting about how how much better things were before, and how we as a society are dependent on big corporations to select what kind of media we want to consume. I do agree that we still need media outlets that offers a broad view of current issues, both domestic and international, but I don't agree that the world will end just because the old media outlets are inable to adapt to the new economy.

A painful voyage from a single perspective

I struggled through "The Cult of the Amateur" for a variety of different reasons, but what sticks with me most vividly is the overwhelming feeling that the author had an alternate agenda - as if at some point I would become a part of a sophisticated infomercial for some far away product. Fortunately, that was not the case, but the struggle to get through it was no less painful.

At the end of the whole thing I found myself wondering what the point was - knowing because it had been pounded into me throughout the story - and not believing that there's anything wrong with the "amateur" challenging the common professional or even the "expert" that might know what he's read or learned in years of experience. I believe, as most Internet people probably do, that sometimes the expert doesn't know what's best and the "amateur" will come up with the next best thing and/or the right idea. The author's hypothesis was quite a bit different, suggesting that the amateur is taking over and that the power is nearly destroying what we know as expert opinion and knowledge. Quite different from how I and most of my peers view things.

Hope that helps for those of you considering this book - perhaps enough to save your credits and wait for it to hit the sale rack.

Too negative

This author is too personal and too emotional on the new technology and their impacts on our life. The booming of Internet changing many things. Not all of them are perfect due to the freedom provided by Internet. Many so called amateurs finally get chance to have their voices heard, and have their knowledge and experience shared. The author has negative view to all of them, and online wiki is singled out to be criticized. Certainly, the benefit of having those amateurs on the Internet benefit all of us. Otherwise we cannot explain why stock price of google price keeping raising