The cult of amateur

From time to time, my wife schedules a pedicure appointment for a Saturday morning. Since the place she goes it next door to Barnes & Noble, I tend to spend an hour or more browsing around looking at things I don’t normally notice. This weekend I stumbled across a new book, The cult of amateur, by Andrew Keen.

As someone who was recently called out as a modern day slave trader, and who has struggled to maintain an open and honest approach to my business, I was particularly interested in this book. I’m absolutely concerned about the effect the web has on kids. I fear raising my daughter in the MySpace era (or whatever’s beyond it). I wonder whether political blogging leads to a lack of political action. It scares me to think that American Idol viewers and/or MySpace users will drive the music industry.

But let’s get this out of the way right up front: This book is a joke. It’s the equivalent of a suddenly "enlightened", Valley elitist who can’t possibly understand how people do anything outside the Valley, ranting in an upscale bar about how the industry he’s contributed to for years is actually bad news. I really don’t want to write about this book because it doesn’t deserve the added attention, but since it’s getting attention I thought it important to add my amateur opinion into the mix.

Keen has basically one key point:

Further, he tries to make the point that by sharing our amateur opinions via blogs, user reviews, and forums, we’re contributing to the downfall of the economy by putting the "real" opinion leaders out of work.

While Keen begins to touch on a topic well worth discussion, his arguments are laughable. A rant of the worst caliber. I started marking inconsistencies, half-baked positions, outright falsities, and generally infuriating misinformation. At 50 pages in, I’ve already marked nearly every page. Here’s a few of my favorite quotes:

It’s hard to even blog about this book without seemingly being part of Keen’s perceived problem.  Funny thing is, Keen is a blogger. And has a quasi-forum to discuss the book. And blogs on his amazon page. And he has a podcast. And of course he’s burning up the conference circuit and getting on as many TV interviews as possible. How do I know? Despite railing on today’s culture of personal ego, he’s more than willing to take advantage of it for his own personal gain. But perhaps he considers himself a "worthy expert", which therefore allows him to do the things he insults us little guys for doing?

I’ll hold off any real review until I’ve finished the book. But I will pass along some comments from Lawrence Lessig, who took the words right out of my mouth:

But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity — from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics.

Clay Shirky also has written a fantastic article on the subject.

What do you think? Do you think the "Web 2.0 culture" (whatever the hell THAT is) is tearing the culture apart? Do we face doom and damnation when we join in the amateur conversations?

Building Community, Business/Marketing, The Internet

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