Andrew Keen: "The Cult of the Amateur"

Sinclair Lewis, in Babbitt, describes a civilization which has no mooring in tradition and its only work is to amuse itself with rubbish. Is Internet culture leading us to a similar place?

While driving from St. Paul to St. Cloud this week I tuned into Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning, a call-in show hosted by Kerri Miller. The guest was Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture".  Even before he had come on the air I had already dismissed him.  I thought to myself: "Here we go again. Yet another attention-whore poseur critic of Wikipedia, Web 2.0, etc.."

But listening to Keen I was quite surprised. I ended up mostly agreeing with him, to the extent that there are some serious issues that we need to think more deeply about as a democracy and as a culture. I suspect most of his critics haven't read his work, which Keen describes as a polemic. Like me many have pounced on him without really listening or thinking through his claims. Keen is not a luddite. He is not an advocate of the status quo. He is not anti-democratic. And he is not nostalgic for some mythical past. He is challenging some of our deeply help assumptions about technology and the pressures on our evolving culture.

I intend to buy his book and read it.