New rule: Books that are short on good ideas should only get short reviews. And so that’s what we’re serv­ing up today — a short review of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Ama­teur: How the Democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the Dig­i­tal World is Assault­ing Our Cul­ture.

Keen’s argu­ment can essen­tial­ly be boiled down to this: Web 2.0 has brought us blogs, Youtube-style video, Wikipedia and oth­er plat­forms that pro­mote user-gen­er­at­ed con­tent, and it’s all killing our Cul­ture. Hacks are now crank­ing out “an end­less dig­i­tal for­est of medi­oc­rity;” “the pro­fes­sion­al is being replaced by the ama­teur… the Har­vard pro­fes­sor by the unschooled pop­u­lace;” “kids can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between cred­i­ble news by objec­tive pro­fes­sion­al jour­nal­ists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com;” “every post­ing is just anoth­er per­son­’s ver­sion of the truth;” with the net result being that in “today’s cul­ture of the ama­teur, the mon­keys are run­ning the show.” Using his own words, that’s the gist of Keen’s argu­ment.

You’d think that by posi­tion­ing him­self as the defend­er of high cul­ture and cul­tur­al author­i­ty, Keen would uphold his end of the bar­gain. That is, you’d expect him to offer us a nuanced, care­ful­ly-craft­ed look at the uses and abus­es of Web 2.0. But that is not what you get here. Miss­ing the mark, The Cult of the Ama­teur is long on hyper­bol­ic rhetoric (see above) and short on sub­tle think­ing and bal­ance. It stretch­es out argu­ments that ought to fill a 15 page arti­cle to 215 pages, and reit­er­ates the same points again and again. (Although tar­get­ed to the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, the book places no pre­mi­um on effi­cien­cy.) And then you have sprin­kled in var­i­ous dilet­tan­tish ref­er­ences to philoso­phers (Marx, Rousseau, Haber­mas, etc.), cou­pled with slop­py read­ings of oth­er con­tem­po­rary media observers.

The ulti­mate irony is that Keen’s polemic against ama­teur con­tent comes off as strange­ly ama­teur­ish. It’s most­ly oper­at­ing at the same lev­el as the very blo­gos­phere he’s attack­ing. And this impres­sion only gets con­firmed by his admis­sion in the acknowl­edg­ments: “I con­fess that, as a writer, I remain a bit of an ama­teur. This is my first book, and I’m still learn­ing the craft of this com­plex busi­ness.” Appar­ent­ly, the divide between tra­di­tion­al media and dig­i­tal media, between high cul­ture and low cul­ture, is not as real and imper­me­able as Keen would have us believe.

If any­one wants my copy of Keen’s book, just let me know. I will send it any­where in the US at book rate. But be warned that it has some illeg­i­ble mar­gin­a­lia, and my kid doo­dled on one page (page 40), unbe­knownst to me. But think of it this way: You get what you don’t pay for. Our email address is in the ban­ner above. First come, first served.

Last weekend’s New York Times Sun­day Mag­a­zine has declared this the Amateur’s Hour, an era when unpaid hob­by­ists can edit break­ing news, design space tech­nol­o­gy for NASA, and pre­dict the end of the world. That last arti­cle is clear­ly an out­lier, but the first two raise an inter­est­ing point—are we get­ting bet­ter ser­vice from process­es like Wikipedia than we did from tra­di­tion­al, top-down hier­ar­chies?

This is a debate that’s been going on for the past cou­ple of years under the guise of Web 2.0, cul­mi­nat­ing in the “You” econ­o­my announced with much fan­fare by Time Mag­a­zine last Decem­ber. In that debate, the bat­tle lines are clear­ly drawn between the YouTube-using, Google Map-mash­ing enthu­si­asts and the skep­tics, like aJaron Lanier, who pre­dicts a form of Dig­i­tal Mao­ism. In that ver­sion of the argu­ment, blog­gers are either cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists or incom­pe­tent muck­rak­ers clog­ging the pores of the body politic.

Now the debate seems to have moved into a wider circle—the realm of the ama­teur ver­sus the pro­fes­sion­al, with or with­out the inter­net. Major out­fits from Net­flix to NASA have been try­ing to out­source some of their trick­i­est prob­lems to the gen­er­al pub­lic, which is as bizarre as it is excit­ing. Andrew Keen, arguably the most Web 2.0‑enabled crit­ic of Web 2.0, is well-placed to com­bat the Times cov­er­age with his new book, The Cult of the Ama­teur: How Today’s Inter­net is Killing our Cul­ture, which he describes as a polemic against all of the mon­keys with type­writ­ers and web­cams (that is, us) the Inter­net has now unleashed upon civ­i­liza­tion.

Per­son­al­ly, I find it hard to believe that “real cul­ture” is drown­ing in a sea of YouTube. If there’s one thing we’re try­ing to do at Open Cul­ture, it’s to har­ness Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies to bring you the best stuff there is: top-notch con­tent from uni­ver­si­ties, cul­tur­al pro­grams and online media around the world. The fact that it might be cre­at­ed by any­one, for any­one doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly make it bad or good—our job as a Web 2.0 fil­ter is to sort that out for you and offer our best sug­ges­tions.

Keen’s self-pro­mo­tion­al ener­gy is an excel­lent exam­ple of how tech­nol­o­gy can enhance the great con­ver­sa­tion. He’s argu­ing his case every­where from Google’s HQ (watch here on YouTube) to the Strand Book­store in Man­hat­tan. A mul­ti­plic­i­ty of view­points cre­ates debate, and debate is gen­er­al­ly a good thing. If there’s one les­son to be learned from “real cul­ture” it’s that life’s great ques­tions don’t have neat or sat­is­fy­ing answers. Inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion is about the best we can hope for, so why not invite more peo­ple to join in?