The Cult of the Amateur
Reviewed on: 9/01/2008
Silicon Valley insider Andrew Keen debates the consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and reveals how it threatens our values, economy, and ultimately innovation and creativity.
From the book cover: "Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns—our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies—are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our “cut-and-paste” online culture—in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated—threatens over 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors. "
Is Web 2.0 a threat, or a paradiagm shift that will ultimately create even more interesting business models than traditional institutions? Read the book, and judge for yourself! - A. Fairchild
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