A book review: The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

I have been reading quite a lot about the current and near future of the new media, most of it predicting massive and on balance positive changes in our world as a result. As I am working on a dissertation on this subject, I have also been on the lookout for a text that would put forward the antithesis of all these other books, to lend a bit of balance to my study, and so when I saw Keen’s book on the shelf at Waterstones, I grabbed it.

After a long day of train travel with nothing but ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ for company I felt let down. I was expecting something that would, as the promotional quotes claimed, be “thought-provoking” “beautifully written” and “witty”. What I found instead was a book that ran on nostalgia, paranoia and a poor understanding of the media industry.

OK, it wasn’t all bad. The part detailing the dangers to society of Wikipedia becoming a serious information source was interesting, if a little sensationalist. There were also some interesting passages towards the end of the book about how our privacy was being threatened, but most of this was supported by anecdotes that did not directly relate to the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

What really got my goat were the lazy, or perhaps dishonest inaccuracies. It is not good enough, in my opinion, for a serious “IT insider” to claim that the world of Web2.0 has brought confusion between the worlds of entertainment and advertising for the first time. This is a blatant falsehood. Product placement has been around in TV shows and movies for as long as I’ve been watching either, probably since the 60’s.

He also doesn’t seem to understand that consumers behave differently when faced with a free product, than they do when asked to pay a fee. He claims that every ad placed for free on Craigslist equals ad revenue lost in the local print media. Really? Does he honestly think I would have paid £20 to advertise the duvet I wanted to give away for free in a newspaper? He makes the same mistake when talking about freely downloaded music, stating that it is logical to see every illegally downloaded track as a theft of 99 cents from the recording company. Absolute nonsense. If I hear a song by an artist I’m unfamiliar with I might download their entire back catalogue for nothing, deleting the tracks I don’t like afterwards, and I know that this sort of behaviour is common amongst my peers. We would be unlikely to buy four albums at full price on a whim and toss them away if we didn’t like them.

He also seems unable to grasp the concept of subjectivity when it comes to musical taste. The Long Tail of music is dismissed by him for this reason, as he states that the few artists that make it to the mainstream do so as the result of their talent, and that for the most part the rest simply aren’t good enough to generate fans. Poppycock. Anyone who has sat next to an ambient trance, black metal, or Mongolian throat-singing fan with an I-pod on a bus will tell you that what one person sees as talent isn’t the same for everyone else. Keen confesses to not being particularly passionate about music, but this is no excuse for this intellectually bereft section of his book.

He goes on to list the negative effects of illegally downloaded films on Hollywood. This admittedly well-researched piece lists how the different production companies are being forced to cut budgets and produce fewer movies, and cinemas are forced to close. Well I say good! Any industry hub that specializes in making me-too, lowest common denominator products should, in a healthy economy, lose ground.

In fact, Keen fully neglects to mention the influence that the decline in quality in both the film and music industries may have had in driving people to illegally download music. Long before the Web2.0 phenomenon, the establishments of film and music were looking to produce products that would simply sell well, and ignored the artistic merits of their output. This lead to people searching out music that was hard to come by through regular distribution channels long before Napster or the Internet came into play. The result is an argument that overstates the case by ignoring clear facts, rather than illuminating a point of view by explaining forces that may have been overlooked.

In Keen’s defence, he was quite obviously making an argument, and it wouldn’t be realistic of us to expect him to list the pros and the cons of Web2.0 in equal measure as a result. However, the possible usefulness of his approach was undone by his inability to support his claims through accurate and rational discourse. I find myself hesitant to quote this text in my dissertation for fear that these inaccuracies would render the entire book academically untenable.

Somewhat ironically, one of his main arguments is that this new media he is attacking is dangerous because there are no editors, no quality control, and no accountability. He states that as a result the population could find themselves misinformed about key issues, which could have a devastating effect on our society. The existence of this error-ridden book, published through traditional old media channels gives some much-needed context to his claims.

If anybody knows of a book dealing with similar subject matter to Keen’s, but with a more sound argument, please let me know of it.