The Cult of the Amateur
US cover
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| Author | Andrew Keen |
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| Translator | English |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Internet, Web 2.0 |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Currency |
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Publication date
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June 5, 2007 |
| Pages | 228 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 78774488 |
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture () is a 2007 book written by entrepreneur and Internet critic Andrew Keen. Published by Currency, Keen's first book is a critique of the enthusiasm surrounding user generated content, peer production, and other Web 2.0-related phenomena.
The book was based in part on a controversial essay Keen wrote for The Weekly Standard, criticizing Web 2.0 for being similar to Marxism, for destroying professionalism and for making it impossible to find high quality material amidst all of the user-generated web content.
Keen argues against the idea of a read-write culture in media, stating that "most of the content being shared— no matter how many times it has been linked, cross-linked, annotated, and copied— was composed or written by someone from the sweat of their creative brow and the disciplined use of their talent." As such, he contrasts companies such as Time Warner and Disney that "create and produce movies, music, magazines, and television" with companies such as Google. He calls the latter "a parasite" since "it creates no content of its own" and "[i]n terms of value creation, there is nothing there apart from its links."
Mr. Keen argues that the democratized Web’s penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threaten not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property. He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organizations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges. And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy and single-song downloads) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or worldwide recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.
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