Comments on: Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur": BRILLIANT!

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By: Marcel Leonardi

Marcel Leonardi — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:12:43 +0000

Regarding the Habermas quote, I don’t know if Andrew Keen did this on purpose or just failed to check the actual source; in any case, this is what Keen quoted:

“The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.” (p55)

This is what Habermas actually said (full text here: http://www.renner-institut.at/download/texte/habermas2006-03-09.pdf)

“Der begrüßenswerte Zuwachs an Egalitarismus, den uns das Internet beschert, wird mit der Dezentrierung der Zugänge zu unredigierten Beiträgen bezahlt. In diesem Medium verlieren die Beiträge von Intellektuellen die Kraft, einen Fokus zu bilden.”

Properly translated, it goes “The welcome growth of egalitarianism that the Internet gives us is paid for with the decentralised access to unedited contributions. In this medium the contributions from intellectuals lose their power to build a focus.”

Andrew Keen’s quote implies an ambivalence about egalitarianism that the original clearly views as a positive, even if it has certain negative consequences. The word begrüßenswerte was omitted.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 01:33:16 +0000

I did not publiclly call him on it earlier, since I thought he might have corrected it, by adding NOT or something after BRILLIANT, after I or others pointed it out to him.

By: catherine

catherine — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 11:31:11 +0000

The real argument of Keen's book is that traditional media and publishing is just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Here's a book -- Keen's -- that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top -- but also riddled with errors. Keen's obvious point is to show those with a blind faith in the traditional system that it can be just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Indeed, one might say even worse, since the Internet doesn't primp itself with the pretense that its words are promised to be true.

By: jessicachristina

jessicachristina — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 09:45:16 +0000

There's much in the book that even we amateur-o-philes should think about. How can we build trust into the structures of knowledge the Internet is enabling (Wikipedia, blogs, etc.)? How can make sure the contribution adds to understanding rather than confuses it? These are hard questions. And as is true of Wikipedia at each moment of every day -- there is more work to be done.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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 04:09:10 +0000

I agree that the book is full of errors a good fact-checker (or just an informed reader with a lot of time) might have caught. I myself prevailed upon Keen to correct some errors he had written about Wikipedia and Citizendium.

This is an obvious flaw, but he also advances a lot of arguments the substance of which cannot easily be dismissed. I'll be interested to see whether what Seth calls "Net evangelists" actually respond to the substance of those arguments. Clay Shirky did, for one.

By: vacuum cleaners

vacuum cleaners — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:19:01 +0000

If Keen has deliberately done this with his book (which is incredibly Ironic, if he hasn't) – but if he HAS then I have to agree with you that “Keen is our generation's greatest self-parodist.” However, the truth of the matter is that the Internet actually opens up opportunities for more of truth and more of real information to get out there. People will now be held accountable for the information they produce – in other words, if the information you produce turns out to be false, people will stop visiting your blog. You simply can't brainwash with the internet – whereas, with traditional media, you could.
It's a simple thing – people and organisations will have to EARN respect rather than just get it simply because they're a publishing house.

By: Badger

Badger — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:54:34 +0000

Clearly, Mr. Keen is not one to be complaining about ignorance. If you can believe it, in a public radio interview just today, he gave voice to his fear of "the crowd " by pointing out that "the crowd" gave us George W. Bush. But there is no question that Al Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election. This is common knowledge. (Less common knowledge is that Al Gore really won the popular vote in Florida, too.) Of course, Mr. Keen then promptly undercut his argument about the need to fear "the crowd" with his claim, which is arguable, that the Internet has had very little effect on our politics!

I enjoyed reading this critique (I have only read the early part): funny, devastating, and very revealing.

By: Brad

Brad — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:44:52 +0000

I happened to hear this man on Coast to Coast AM and found him to be insufferably dumb. He fears the internet because his old withered brain cannot cope and handle the content found therein. He seems to think that we are all ignorant ugly goblins who can't think for ourselves and need corporations and mass media to spoon feed us information and tell us what to buy, who to listen to, how to think, and how to exist. We want to think for ourselves, so we have embraced the Cult of Amateurs! This cult of amateurs will be the downfall of mass media! The problem is that he sees this as a bad thing. The downfall of record companies and corrupt journalism! Good. He keeps mentioning that the internet will eliminate newspapers, so be it. They're obsolete and so is he. We've moved on to faster and larger sources of information. If he had lived ten thousand years ago, he would have fought against papyrus scrolls in favor of carving on stone tablets. This guy is a relic.

We can, contrary to popular belief, think for ourselves, filter through the garbage and get to the truth on the internet. We can, contrary to popular belief, choose how best to live our own lives. We can, contrary to popular belief, handle freedom and handle free speech. There is a revolution in progress and you can do nought to stop it. The disgruntled proletariot is marching toward the battlements of their corporate overlords wielding not the pitchforks and torches of the past, but instead we wield mp3s mpegs and freely spoken blogs. We will have our freedom at any cost.