Book Review: The Cult of the Amateur - How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today's User-Generated Media are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values by Andrew Keen - Page 2

From the dumbing down of media, to the unfiltered web of lies or truth, and the risks to children in the artificial reality online, Keen also does a good job of explaining the inherent risks in search engine technology. The aggregated result of our web searches, and snippets of private information stored online, with our permission, provide the world with an unstoppable database of private information in public hands.

Other points raised:

• The more we empower the amateur, the more we undermine the authority of experts, and so we get what we pay for.
• Who polices the blogs that misstate information, and wiki entries that alter history or spread rumor as fact?
• Where are the editors, fact checkers, regulators, and skilled journalists?

Since Web 2.0 isn't going to roll over and die, Keen concludes The Cult of the Amateur with examples of ways we can put Web 2.0 back in the hands of the experts. He sites the British newspaper, the Guardian Unlimited, which "does a brilliant job of integrating the authoritative traditions of the newspaper with the interactive democracy of the Web 2.0 world." Of necessity, other newspapers and journalism sites now follow the same path: using the web to bring the best journalism to more people through more methods, but it is solid, tested, journalism backed by integrity.

Intended to stimulate open-minded discussion of the digital revolution, Keen's book will open your eyes to the rapid changes in society brought about by user-generated resources online, and the staggering economic cost of transforming "other people's free content into a multi-billion dollar advertising machine."

If you don't have time to read about how Web 2.0 robs us of our time – maybe Keen has made his point.

Article Author: Helen Gallagher

Helen Gallagher reviews non-fiction books and shares insights when attending author and publishing events on Chicago's North Shore. She is a national speaker on technology, writing and publishing. She's a member of American Society of Journalists & …

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