Andrew Keen on The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture
Purchase The Cult of the Amateur.
Andrew Keen, Author, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, reminded professional content producers that they’re good enough, they’re smart enough, and doggonit, people like them. Most importantly, the world needs them.
The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that “every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen.”
Andrew is a leading contemporary critic of the Internet. Andrew hasn’t always been a contrarian. In the mid Nineties, he was a member of the generation of Silicon Valley visionaries who first “got” the Internet. He founded Audiocafe.com in 1995, and, securing significant investment from Intel and SAP, established it as one of the most highly trafficked websites of the late Nineties. As the Chief Executive of Audiocafe.com, Andrew became a Silicon Valley celebrity. He spoke regularly on the digital media circuit and was featured and quoted in many newspapers and magazines including Esquire, The Industry Standard, Business Week, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and The London Guardian.
In 2000, Andrew produced “MB5: The Festival for New Media Visionaries,” a futurist show featuring some of Silicon Valley’s leading pundits. Since then, he has held senior management positions at a number of venture capital backed start-ups including Pulse, Santa Cruz Networks and Pure Depth.
Andrew is currently the Founder and Chief Executive of afterTV LLC, a firm that helps marketers optimize their brand desirability in the post-TV consumer landscape.
Jason Kichline is ScribeMedia's project manager and producer of ScribeMedia's Emmy Award winning series Reporting AIDS. He likes typos, fast food and MacGyver like solutions to life's nagging problems.
Well…where to begin. I agree that the ability to curate user-generated content is a key growth area this year, but it’s clear that user-generated content is becoming authoritative in more ways than we can imagine.
Professional authors need to come to terms with this more deeply. The ability of content to collect an affirming and trusted community is as important in many instances as the ability for people in an hierarchical structure to declare content to be authoritative.
Social media underscores the need for authority to flow from people who have to live with the consequences of authority - democracy, in other words. Democracies have designated, trusted representatives, administrators and leaders, and this will continue, but inherently it’s the market’s responsibility to seek out its own view of what is authoritative content if we are to have the efficiences to cope and thrive in a rapidly changing global economy.
More at Content Nation and in my upcoming book. I am not saying that Andrew’s view is all tosh, but I do find it interesting that he sidestepped all of the highly positive, high-quality and monetizable initiatives that publishers have taken on in social media.
It’s an appealing position for traditionalists, but the money is not in the traditionalists’ models any more. They need to redeploy their editorial staffs to manage quality user-generated content more effectively.