I'm in the proces of reading "The cult of the amateur" by Andrew Keen, and I know that I should probably finish it before commenting, but this guy is really depressing me. He comes across as a really grumpy old guy. His basic claim (which isn't all that far of) is that the coming of Web 2.0 is killing or culture, because basically anyone can become (and soon is) a voice on the internet. The first half of the book is filled with examples. Of how everyone cheats and lies and how we can't distinguish facts from fiction anymore. Well, here's my take: Cheats and liars have existed since we crawled out of the slime quite some time ago. Some time later, in the early days of the telegraph elaborate ways to use this new medium to cheat were not uncommon as Tom Standage explains in "the Victorian Internet".
Another example of how Web 2.0 is undermining our community is the claim that our economy is crippled by having amateurs doing the jobs of professionals. In one example he calculates that $331.000 were sucked out of the economy because a company choose to have amateurs compete to create their Super Bowl Ad. Somehow I don't really feel sorry for the Ad professionals being cheated this way. Also, could it be that the $331.000 were spent on something else, or maybe even given to shareholders? And finally - I do believe that the marketing people will have made a decent cost benefit analysis of this before going this way.
I really feel insulted that I should not be able to distinguish between what's good and what's bad. I'm a normal person - but that doesn't mean that I'm naive and don't question the validity of any source of information I come across. And even if I can't tell right from wrong, I hope that they will teach my kids more thorough source criticism, than I was taught.
The most ironic thing is that Andrew Keen has his own blog!
Sorry that there were no user focus in this entry - but I just had to get this of my chest. I'll get back when I've finished the book - I might just end up being positive after all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment