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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Web threatens discourse, says writer

Daniel A. Hoyt The Spokesman-Review

“The Cult of the Amateur”

by Andrew Keen (Doubleday, 228 pages, $22.95)

According to Time magazine, you were the 2006 Person of the Year.

According to Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur,” you might become very sorry about receiving this accolade.

While Time lauded the democracy, the interactivity and the collaborative possibilities of the information age, Keen’s book offers a strong and engagingly written warning about this new World Wide Web order.

Keen, a self-described “apostate,” was once a mover and shaker in Silicon Valley. But in 2004 he began to examine how the Internet was doing irreparable damage to the old media and the institutions that created, defined and refined American mass culture: books, newspapers, magazines, movies, television studios and recording companies.

Now anyone can start a blog on physics, contribute to the encyclopedia entry on Russia or mash up a song by Bruce Springsteen, Keen worries that the experts – trained physicists, professional students of Russia, maybe even Bruce Springsteen himself – will lose their voices, their power and their careers.

But most of all, he worries that the Internet might rob American society of cultural meaning and a respect for truth.

‘The cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader and writer, between artist and spin doctor, between art and advertisement, between amateur and expert,” Keen writes.

“The result? The decline of the quality and reliability of the information we receive, thereby distorting, if not outright corrupting, our national civic conversation.”

Although Keen examines a number of troubling issues related to the Internet – sexual predation, erosion of privacy, identity theft, online gambling – he is at his finest when he rallies for an endangered species: the gatekeepers of the old media.

By the time you read this review, for example, multiple editors will have combed these paragraphs for accuracy, clarity and a variety of other issues. On the Internet, an incredibly small percentage of Web pages come under such editorial scrutiny, Keen points out.

Unfortunately, “The Cult of the Amateur” could have used better editing itself. Too often, Keen leans dangerously on one or two anecdotes to make his argument.

He quotes the transcript of one interview, originally published on the Internet, as “proof” that the Web “is accelerating kids’ sexual and social development in very dangerous ways.”

Despite these flaws, Keen’s warning resonates with thoughtfulness, and his book supplies many reasons for bloggers and blogaphobics to ponder life in the Internet age.