“The Cult of the Amateur” - Keen on Blogs
Last week Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, appeared on Radio 4’s You and Yours to discuss the internet. It was a fairly interesting discussion, where comments ranged from “The internet is wonderful, you can find anything” to “It’s an invention worse than the atom bomb”, a reference to its impact on traditional businesses.
Broadly speaking, the premise of the book is that the internet is home to “amateur content”. The majority of blogs are full of opinion where the facts aren’t checked and authors can’t be held to account, whilst sites like Wikipedia contain a lot of misinformation. Another issue addressed is that content creators, artists ad musicians are finding it harder to earn a living thanks to the internet.
It’s an interesting discussion and one worth reading about. I think crowd based news websites mean we’re seeing more stories than we might do if we relied solely on a newspaper and TV channel. For example, I wouldn’t know who Ron Paul was if I wasn’t a visitor to Digg. You would do well by starting with this discussion with Andrew Keen and Emily Bell, digital content director at the Guardian. Andrew Keen v Emily Bell - Is today’s internet killing our culture?
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