This book goes too far, yet does not go far enough. Keen blasts the Web 2.0 revolution for allegedly destroying the music industry, newspaper journalism, the book-publishing industry and respect for knowledge, talent and hard work. Much of the time, he knows what he is talking about, having worked in Silicon Valley himself. Some of his claims are well-documented and convincing. Illegal and legal file-sharing is indeed destroying the music industry, and now that news is so easy to find on the internet, people are less and less inclined to buy newspapers, let alone advertise in them, which is financially more important. As a result, good and successful bands are finding it hard to get their music published, and the days of professional journalism may be counted. Quite rightly, he challenges these two industries to come up with creative responses to these perils. It seems to me that he exaggerates the threat to the book-publishing industry.
He makes much of the dangers of social networking and search engines that store data to children and the privacy of adults. Fine, but I don't see that that is closely related to the cult of the amateur.
Keen also hates Wikipedia, which he calls unreliable. Here too he has a point, but he fails to admit that an amazing number of articles in Wikipedia are amazingly good and well-balanced. The free encyclopedia is not nearly as bad as he makes it out to be.
My major complaint about Keen's book is that he limits his diatribe against the cult of the amateur to the web. When television and radio could no longer think of new ways of reaching out to their laziest and most stupid audiences, they simply let the audiences run the show. Reality TV! Fortunately, my TV had broken down by the time Big Brother was invented in the Netherlands, so I was spared most of that. But I have suffered as my favourite radio broadcaster, the BBC World Service, increasingly turned its microphones over to its listeners. Vox Populi! I can remember the days when that station would not have stooped to reporting on Tiger Woods's extramarital escapades. But okay, I realise this is the 21st century. And now that most media have embraced the old principle that there's brass in muck, it seems unfair to blame the BBC World Service for dipping in its toe. But who, pray, wants to hear the opinion of an Estonian kindergarten teacher, a Nigerian taxi driver or an Indonesian bank clerk on Tiger's nightly exploits? What a useless and irritating way to fill a radio show.
So all hail to Andrew Keen when he calls for a rehabilitation of the expert. God knows university professors are not right all of the time. But if you wanted to know whether healthy food and exercise will really reduce your risk of getting cancer, would you rather turn to a cancer researcher from a leading university or to the guy who just delivered that XXXL pizza you ordered?
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