The Cult of the Amateur
by Rob - June 16th, 2007.Filed under: Uncategorized.
I just posted this five-star review on Amazon.com of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture by Andrew Keen:
There’s so much received wisdom already about Web 2.0 — so many people who have already staked out turf, and announced that THIS is the way it’s going to be — that it’s very refreshing, and very thought provoking, to see a new take on all this. William Gibson once said that the job of the science-fiction writer (which is what both he and I do for a living) is to be profoundly ambivalent about changes in science and technology. To date, we’ve had way too much on the plus side of blogging, Wikipedia, Facebook, and, yes, Amazon.com, with very few countervailing voices. You may not agree with everything Keen says — I certainly don’t myself, although I do agree with a lot of it — but, despite the cult-of-the-amateur approach to most reviewing these days (“I agree with the author” = five stars; “I disagree with the author” = one star — although Keen doesn’t cite this specific example), this book is well-researched, passionately argued, copiously footnoted, and compulsively readable. I recommend it highly.
For more on The Cult of the Amateur, see here.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site