It's Andrew Keen's (his blog) turn to be Internet villian of the month, occasioned by the recent publication of his book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. At the same time, his thesis will be cheered by many in the traditional media. Moira Gunn spoke with him on her Tech Nation program. Link: ITConversations.com.
His book has generated a lot of intemperate comment, but, not surprisingly, Clay Shirky has provided the most thoughtful critique I've read in, What are we going to say about "Cult of the Amateur"?. Here's a sample:
... More importantly, talent is unevenly distributed, and everyone knows it. Indeed, one of the many great things about the net is that talent can now express itself outside traditional frameworks; this extends to blogging, of course, but also to music, as Clive Thompson described in his great NY Times piece, or to software, as with Linus[Torvalds]’ talent as an OS developer, and so on. The price of this, however, is that the amount of poorly written or produced material has expanded a million-fold. Increased failure is an inevitable byproduct of increased experimentation, and finding new filtering methods for dealing with an astonishingly adverse signal-to-noise ratio is the great engineering challenge of our age (c.f. Google.) Whatever we think of Keen or CotA, it would be insane to deny that. ...
Link: Many 2 Many. --Dennis
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