Scott Rosenberg has a recap of tonight's Berkeley Cybersalon with "Cult of the Amateur" author Andrew Keen:
“Is it always like this?” A business acquaintance who I chatted with briefly at the Berkeley Cybersalon earlier this evening asked me as the panel discussion — titled “New Media Wars: Amateur versus Auteur” — wound down.
“Quite often, actually,” I answered him.
I assumed he was referring to the heated back-and-forth between the attendees and the panelists — and, occasionally, among the panelists themselves (Dan Gillmor, Katie Hafner, Robert Scoble and Andrew Keen). The event’s hook was Keen’s new book, “The Cult of the Amateur.” Keen’s self-described “polemic” is not yet available, and I haven’t read it, so I won’t comment directly on it. But the book’s subtitle tells you where Keen’s coming from: “How today’s Internet is killing our culture.”
[...]
Keen has lobbed his bombs before — and in the same place, yet — but I find it hard to take them seriously. (I should mention that he did a podcast interview with me about my book — and he’s charming when he’s not lobbing grenades and building stockades around the ancien regime.) I don’t think he honestly believes that, as his book’s subtitle has it, “The Internet is killing our culture.” Ironically, of course, Keen himself used his own blog as a launch pad for his ideas. He admitted tonight that he is, himself, an “amateur writer.” He claims to be motivated by a desire to “annoy libertarians of the left and libertarians of the right.”
Something tells me he might win a little less attention but a lot more credibility if he stopped trying so hard to annoy. There must be some valuable criticism lodged among all the bluster.
Link: Amateur Hour.
I must admit I'm a bit tired of Keen's shtick already, just from all the publicity and blogging about it.
Rosenberg mentions another new book that it seems everyone in that incestuous A-list Silicon Valley/Wired blogger world is gushing over: David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. Publisher's Weekly says Weinberger "joins the ranks of social thinkers striving to construct new theories around the success of Google and Wikipedia." In other words it's the latest half-baked "the internet is changing everything!" business claptrap to keep the venture capitalists excited. I think I'll pass.
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