The Cult of the Amateur
As a technical amateur - nobody's paying me to do "this website thingy" - I felt morally obligated to read Simon Keen's somewhat screedish The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. For most of the first half of the book, I thought I was reading a rant. For most of the second half, however, I was persuaded that the anti-authoritarian propensity behind so much "Web 2.0" talk is not only childish but damaging.
Mr Keen's book does not offer much in the way of solutions. Even he cannot conceal the fact that current delivery systems for creative cultural work are moribund. The Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular have blossomed because established cultural institutions don't know how to reach young people - probably because the people who run them don't really understand computers or the Internet. I hope that Mr Keen's book will come to be regarded as the excellent diagnosis of a crisis that was ultimately contained and corrected.
