[Web4lib] Andrew Keen: Doesn't Like Web 2.0 Nor His Spinach. PT. TWO:

[Gerry Mckiernan]

Colleagues/

Today's NYTimes has a review of Andrew Keen's new book: _THE CULT OF
THE AMATEUR: How Today*s Internet Is Killing Our Culture_ :

And I Quote:

Digital utopians have heralded the dawn of an era in which Web 2.0 *
distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like
MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content,
social networking and interactive sharing * ushers in the
democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more
opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees. Yet
as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen points out in his
provocative new book, *The Cult of the Amateur,* Web 2.0 has a dark
side as well.

Mr. Keen argues that *what the Web 2.0 revolution is really
delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather
than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment.*
In his view Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape and not for the
better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property
rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will *live to see
the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and
television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive
celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising.* This is
what happens, he suggests, *when ignorance meets egoism meets bad
taste meets mob rule.*

[snip]

Because Web 2.0 celebrates the *noble amateur* over the expert, and
because many search engines and Web sites tout popularity rather than
reliability, Mr. Keen notes, it*s easy for misinformation and rumors
to proliferate in cyberspace. For instance, the online encyclopedia
Wikipedia (which relies upon volunteer editors and contributors) gets
way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica (which
relies upon experts and scholars), even though the interactive format
employed by Wikipedia opens it to postings that are inaccurate,
unverified, even downright fraudulent.

[snip]

For that matter, as Mr. Keen points out, the idea of objectivity is
becoming increasingly passé in the relativistic realm of the Web, where
bloggers cherry-pick information and promote speculation and spin as
fact. Whereas historians and journalists traditionally strived to
deliver the best available truth possible, many bloggers revel in their
own subjectivity, and many Web 2.0 users simply use the Net, .... .

[snip]

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.

[snip]
Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very
sources of the content they crave.*

BTW: Don't Forget to Listen To The NPR w/Keen

[ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11131872 ]

Oh Mighty GateKeeper Where Are You When We Need You ... [:-)

/Gerry 

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

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