Video: Interview: Andrew Keen - The Cult of the Amateur - How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture
Lately I’ve been feeling the need to share some serious topics with you. About online and cultural trends, to be specific.
Some of you will probably find this quite boring, just know that these topics in fact àre all about you, so they do concern you. I’m sorry to say so but you won’t escape marketeers, you won’t escape the media, and since you’ve read this far already you’re damn far from escaping the web.
Introducing Andrew Keen, whose book “Cult of the Amateur - How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture” seems to be growing into becoming the hype of the year.
Basically the web2.0 revolution (read: blogs competing newssites, youtube killing traditional tv watching, etc.) has always been looked at as being the democratisation of content.
The user taking over, making his own decisions, therefor liberating himself from the big corporations, serving other users with what they really want, not with what is dictated by major companies.
Keen, however, believes this is all a bunch of crap. Amateurs have indeed partially taken over the content-monopoly once driven by professional journalists, tv-makers, designers, etc. But this hasn’t given us the cultural revolution so many had hoped for.
Web2.0 has given opportunities to certain talented people, but the really big successes are, for instance, webcam videos about nothing, blogs about nothing, etc. So how does this justify the demonisation of classic media?
Being an amateur myself, I must say I don’t feel offended. On-point is not a political blog and I don’t think I ever pretended holding the truth.
I think it’s good to finally see someone stand up and take a stance against the crowdsourcing trend, a trend that is nice, but isn’t holy, I think.
Anyway. Stay tuned and think about it, these are the times we’re living in!
Here’s a Andrew Keen speaking at ‘Authors@Google’. I’ve made you a small selection of quotes, just for you to think about:
- “If we’re going to use the internet as a self-publicating platform, we nééd to have something to say. Otherwise it degenerates into a state of digital narcicissm where everything simply becomes a reflection of ourselves. We Twitter ourselves to death and we use the internet to tell the world what we had for breakfast or what we watched on televsion and that’s not valuable for ourselve or for any type of collective conversation.”
- “We need middlemen. We need experts. Whether experts are in marketing or in creativity, whether they’re in finding talent and figuring out how to polish it and distribute it. These are the core players in every media system..
- “The flattening of culture, the idealised web 2.0 system, where the intermediarists go away has profoundly unfortunate and often dangerous consequenses.”
- “Media literacy is the thing we need to build now. We have this open system, the challenge is to read it critically. The challenge is not to believe everything that is posted up on Wikipedia. The challenge is not to think that this sort of idealised media system can deliver us truth. -…- Truth is even harder to find.”
“The great seduction of the internet is to become a broadcaster ourselves, to use it as a platform to express ourselves. -…- I think we need to remind ourselves that there are many times where we need to remain silent, where we need to remain in the audience.”
Very much looking forward to hearing your opinion on these statements. I hope you still dare to comment after that last statement though.
On-Point Podcast