Example Of Book Review On The Cult Of The Amateur: Review

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture is a text by Andrew Keen. Keen is an entrepreneur and has long been an open critic of the Web 2.0-based Internet culture that has emerged since the year 2000. Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur, is concerned with the cost of Internet culture. Perhaps one of the most important statements that Keen makes regarding the rise of the Internet culture as it exists today is that the culture is similar to Marxism in that it creates a dearth of professionally-quality content.
When discussing The Cult of the Amateur, it is important to consider the state of the Internet today. The Internet and the rise of Web 2.0 content has created the opportunity for everyone with an Internet connection to become a published author, photographer, journalist, and so on; this has been a wonderful achievement for the spread of information, but it has also increased the amount of noise that one must sift through before finding the pertinent, factual information that the user is looking for.
Keen makes a point of discussing how the Web 2.0 technologies and the newfound blogosphere is killing intellectual conversation by making opinion the primary form of discussion in the blogosphere. He points out that when everyone can have an opinion-- and have one loudly-- the amount of intellectual discussion quickly diminishes into nearly nothing. Intellectuals, Keen states, get lost in the noise of opinion and there is no way for intellectual discussion to become the central focus of the discussion of any particular topic.
Keen also lambasts Google for being “parasitic.” Unlike other new technologies, he states, the idea of the search engine is in and of itself parasitic because Google creates nothing but links. There is no original content created by Google, Keen says, and for this reason the search engine is a parasitic company and should not be considered a triumph of technology. In addition, he points out that Google as a metric for a site’s popularity can easily be fooled by a technique known as “Google bombing,” where the first hit from the search engine can be manipulated by merely linking to a specific site and correlating links to specific sets of keywords. This is important enough that it has spawned an entire new career path: search engine optimization technology professionals are some of the more sought-after information technology professionals today.
Another point that Keen makes is that the rise of free services like Craigslist and Wikipedia are not actually free for society as a whole. Every time an individual uses a site like Wikipedia or Craigslist, he or she is taking away his or her money from more traditional paid sites (Keen uses the example of a traditional print newspaper advertisement or Encyclopedia Britannica).
Keen refers to the ability of Web 2.0 sites to aggregate information and regurgitate it as “cannibalism;” these sites, like Wikipedia and Google, are taking away legitimate business from the creators of the information, he says. Every time someone uses a “free” site, the cost is much higher than they realize, because the cost of foregoing paid sites or services for free ones is far-reaching and can destroy entire industries.
The last major point that Keen makes is that Web 2.0 and the related technologies are fueled primarily by the collective efforts and knowledge of the masses. This sounds noble, but Keen has a remarkably bad opinion of the intelligence of the masses, and the ability of those people to make good decisions; he points out that the masses are responsible for slavery, infanticide, and so on; they are bad, he says, at making decisions, and should not be allowed to make decisions regarding intellectual discussions as a whole.
While Keen makes some good points about the problematic aspects of Web 2.0 applications, he is so hard-line in his insistence that the average individual is under-educated and should not be trusted to speak about most topics is both patronizing and silly. The book could have been a good point of discussion for the issues presented by Internet culture, but instead, it presents an argument that attacks the intellectual capacity of the very people he is targeting as his audience.