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The Cult of the Amateur: how today's Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy, by Andrew Keen

One of the great things about what I do is that I can choose what I want to to have an opinion about. If I want to ignore something, I ignore it. If the mere idea of seeing a particular film or book bores me to death, then I choose life. That's because I'm one of those blockheads who writes on the web for the sheer love of writing and the sheer love of fame, in the hope that one day I'll make a living from my words, or sell more books if one day I actually finish a book about anything. So I have no boss, no editor, and no one to tell me what to think or what to review. But there is a sense in which that very fact makes me feel duty-bound to write about this book. It would be cowardice not to. Because in it, Andrew Keen in effect argues that what I'm doing is wrong: corrosive to everything I value, corrupting the values I want to uphold. I simply have to take his argument on, and in the process justify my existence and my entire project.

The Cult of the Amateur is a highly readable polemic that conveys a sense of intense urgency and passion as it argues that the internet (or the capitalised "Internet" as Keen insists on calling it) in its current manifestation, "Web 2.0", is a corrupting influence perverting truth and cultural values and threatening important industries like the music business, bookshops and newspapers.

In essence, Keen argues that the emergence of blogging as a mass phenomenon undermines truth because bloggers not only are free from the constraints and checks that are built into the world of newspapers, so that inaccuracy is the rule, but also because bloggers are actively trying to distort truth in the service of political, often extreme agendas. Not only that, but blogging dumbs the world down because bloggers' interests are trivial compared to those of broadcasters and publishers. Truth is also undermined by Wikipedia (one of Keen's main targets) because it relativises truth: anyone's view is as valuable as anyone else's, when anyone can add to or amend a Wikipedia entry anonymously and no one's opinion is worth more than anyone else's, regardless of qualifications.

Wikipedia has no reporters, no editorial staff, and no experience in newsgathering. It's the blind leading the blind - infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.  

The internet is destroying the music business, argues Keen, because it encourages mass digital piracy which steals revenue from music companies and artists, and it's destroying bookshops and CD shops, too, and not simply because it's cheaper to download things or order them from Amazon.com. The fact that kids can now record their music and distribute it free via MySpace means there's no need for anyone to pay for it and no incentive to invest in high production values. The fact that comment is freely available on blogs undermines newspapers, as does the free advertising carried by sites like Craigslist, which Keen sees as robbing money from local papers.

It's a coherent argument and I agree with some of it. Keen is concerned, for instance, about the economic model underlying blogging: no one can get rich doing it, and even the most widely-read bloggers earn little from what they do. Musicians can be popular on MySpace but still make no money that way. I agree with Keen that this is a real challenge for bloggers and musicians, and each of us has to come up with some kind of solution personally at least. One way of developing an income is to be noticed and offered paid writing work - like Iain Dale, for instance, who writes for the Telegraph now, or Oliver Kamm. Another is to attract serious advertising, as Iain Dale, again, and other bloggers linked to MessageSpace are at least trying to do, and with some success by the look of it. Other initiatives like Scoopt may offer a way forward - though ScooptWords, for writers rather than photographers, seems not to have taken off.

On the blogosphere, publishing one's own "journalism" is free, effortless, and unencumbered by pesky ethical restraints or bothersome editorial boards.

But I think Keen underestimates the strength of traditional media and the benefits blogs and free music downloads bring. It's true, as Keen says, that only proper papers and broadcasters can make the investment required to report news, and that bloggers rely on the mainstream media to find stories to react to and comment on. That's right: blogs are essentially parasitic on mainstream media, or at least the linkable-to web presence of mainstream media organisations, and the newsgathering business isn't threatened by them. The relationship is a symbiotic one, in my view, in which mainstream media is constantly referenced and advertised and in which its authority is continually reinforced. Keen accepts towards the end of the book that traditional media organisations can adapt and succeed in the internet world, like the Guardian. The BBC has shown it can do the same thing. It may be that fewer newspapers will survive in the future, but it's going too far to blame that on bloggers. Newspaper circulation was declining in the UK for years before the internet came along.

A seriously wrong assumption I think underlying all Keen's argument is his insistence that anything got for free on the internet would otherwise have been bought.

Of course, every free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper. Every visit to Wikipedia's free information hive means one less customer for a professionally-researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica. Every free music or video download is one less sale of a CD or DVD, meaning one less royalty for the artist who created it.

But this is absolutely wrong, isn't it? I look at the New York Times website and that of Le Monde several times a week, at least. Does that mean those newspapers have lost three or four sales a week each? Of course not. Attracting me to their websites means they get more value from me in terms of selling products and advertising, and perhaps even some kind of subscription service, than they would otherwise. And I reckon most advertisers on Craigslist would otherwise have advertised in shop windows or else not at all. It's this failure to see that internet freebies can generate economic activity as well as simply displacing it that mars Keen's economic analysis. Plus the fact that he ignores crucial points such as that free advertising wasn't invented by the internet at all! Nor does it have any necessary link to it. Traditional newspapers in London must have suffered from the birth of the free ads paper Loot, which I used long before the internet reached our homes, and Eddy Shah's free newspapers undermined the local press in the 1980s. There's a choice of free "newspapers" (if you can call them that) in London now, and no doubt they are having a negative effect on other papers' circulations, but they are hard-copy, snail-press papers with nothing virtual about them. So why blame everything on the web?

Another plank of Keen's argument is that blogs offer dumbed-down, distorted content and trivia. Well, he's obviously right that many of them do. But if he's right that half of all blogs exist solely to give personal news to friends and family, shouldn't he welcome that? That truly is something the mainstream press does not aim to do, and the fact that people indulge in that sort of thing poses no threat whatever to serious publications like the Telegraph. Apart from that, I think Keen is too unwilling to give credit to those bloggers who do provide good quality content, and to give readers credit for being able to tell quality from its opposite. Why does he think the web stops readers knowing good from bad?

a pajama army of mostly anonymous, self-referential writers who exist not to report news but to spread gossip

He ignores two critical benefits the blogosphere brings: a new source of writers for the mainstream media, and a new way for those in power to account to the public. As Sam Roggeveen argued in a speech to Australia's Lowy Institute recently, not many people have the ability or motivation to work as newspaper columnists, and only a minority of those can ever actually succeed in finding that work. Blogs offer one way in which people can, in effect, train to write comment and in which newspapers can identify new, talented writers whose online work speaks for itself. And as for accountability, I love the fact that increasing numbers of politicians now blog. Not all their blogs are dry-as-dust borefests, either, as Nadine Dorries's blog shows. Blogs allow voters to know much more than they otherwise would about what their representatives think and do, proving that economic viability is not the only test of whether blogging can justify its existence. I can't think, actually, of how else I could possibly have any idea what MEPs do.

Keen does three things that significantly undermine his thesis. First of all, the language he uses about blogs, Wikipedia and so on reveal an unwarranted, sweeping negativity about everything virtual. If every blogger really were spewing, to use his word, I might agree with him. But they're not, or at least I  hope you agree they're not. Second, he bolsters the case for the prosecution by complaining that the internet is responsible for any number of new problems: identity fraud, threats to privacy, spam, the commercialisation of life, slander, click-fraud, online gambling addiction, piracy, porn and paedophilia. I don't doubt that some social problems, like the existence of child porn and gambling addiction, have been exacerbated by the internet. And some problems, like spam, are pure internet phenomena. But none of these things are really caused by Web 2.0, which is what Keen's argument is supposedly aimed at. To bring them in blurs and weakens his point, and turns this book into a generalised harangue against the internet and all its wicked works.

YouTube eclipses even the blogs in the inanity and absurdity of its content. nothing seems too prosaic or narcissistic for these videographer monkeys.

 Third, as I've already suggested, he ignores the fact that many of the problems he identifies existed well before the web was ever thought of. Take music "theft" for instance. I remember format-shifting a vinyl LP of the Genesis album Three Sides Live (please don't ask why I wanted to do that) on to a cassette tape in 1982, and, guess what? I don't think I was alone in getting up to that sort of thing. And pirate videos were available long before CDs, let alone the web. As for dumbing down and the tawdrification of culture, the Sun and the National Enquirer existed some time before computers, if I'm not mistaken.

And finally: he's excessively deferential to the idea of the expert, to qualifications and credentials as the measure of whether someone should be listened to. But that approach is dangerously hierarchical - I'm choosing that word deliberately - and anyway, the argument doesn't work. Venerating "credentials" is what leads to the kind of courtier's reply argument Terry Eagleton tried against Richard Dawkins , that only theologians should dabble with questions about God. Nonsense! What matters is not whether someone like Eagleton or Dawkins is a professor, and where, but the content of what they say and write. Outside the web there are bogus universities and bogus professors, bogus journals and bogus fields of study, none of which deserve the respect Keen seems to imply they should get and some of whom have been allowed to dominate whole fields of thought, in part because they had empty credentials. As Chomsky has said, the mark of real intellectual substance of any discussion is concern for the content of what is said, not the credentials of the speaker. I feel I honour Chomsky's approach every time I splutter over some political utterance of his that I think is bunkum. I can't quite believe that Keen cites Robert Fisk as an example of a trained, authoritative expert of Middle East affairs. I'm not dissing Fisk, but surely no one can think his view of the Middle East can be held up as embodying an authority undeserving of criticism except by experts.  

Andrew Keen's book is a challenging read for anyone who's decided to commit any serious part of their lives to the web, whether as a blog reader or blogger, a social networker, flickr photographer or Wikipedia user. But I think it's challenge that ultimately fails: the internet is a complicated thing that has brought good things as well as bad. Read on, and feel fine about it.