A short time ago, BoingBoing posted a story about the book Cult of the Amateur.
Mr. Keen argues that “what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.” In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will “live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.” This is what happens, he suggests, “when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.”
This could feasibly be one of the most obtuse observations ever printed. Its essentially making the argument that the first automobiles produced were simply items heavier than horses. I am not the first person to take issue with Andrew Keen. I’m not sure what mainstream news Mr. Keen is watching, but between Paris Hilton, Natalee Holloway, and HeadOn Commercials… I must be missing this glorious content I can’t get anywhere else.
Nope, wait a second… I turn to the internet to give the superficial stories I see on the TV news some sort of depth and character. Maybe Andrew Keen hasn’t seen the internet? He should check it out sometime.
Or how about this review by David Robinson at American.com:
Consider a typical example from the book: Super Bowl ads. The advertising industry says a professional 30-second spot costs about $381,000 to make. Instead of hiring an agency, Frito-Lay in 2006 ran a contest to let users make their own ads for Doritos. The company, Keen writes, “paid a mere $10,000 to each of the five finalists in the competition, leaving $331,000 on the table. That’s $331,000 that wasn’t paid to professional filmmakers, script writers, actors, and marketing companies—$331,000 sucked out of the economy.”
Yeah, because I am sure Frito Lay just stacked up that $331,000, doused it in gasoline, and burned the sin out of it instead of reinvesting it elsewhere. The only question this book raises is “How naive do you have to be in order to purchase this book?”
(As a side note, read this article by Larry Sanger.)