I have read Keen’s book ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ pretty interestingly. I have agreed with some of his ideas, but some of reasons he mentions make me to be hard to support his argument.
Keen complains that amateur cultural critics, artists and musicians are raising serious cultural and ethical questions and they are dangerous and scary. He also says that the real challenge in today’s Web 2.0 is finding and nurturing true talent in an online sea of amateurs.
I agree that some of amateur content online immature and fool, but amateur writers, amateur producers, amateur technicians and amateur audience are creative, genuine and new. It is also obvious that posting an opinion on blogs or YouTube does not require professional training or superior accreditation. However, some of information is from their personal experience and wisdom that never appears in books. Moreover, there are various cultural circumstances that scientific disciplines or punditry cannot perfectly explain.
Moreover, all conversation of the Internet is not a total waste of time and the utility of Wikipedia information seems hard to consider itself a full of trash. There is not just some isolated computer geeks who want make themselves famous in virtual world, there are actually more individuals who want to contribute online and share their wisdom. The experts may claim that an professional journalism and their decades of education, experience and training in the field should be remunerated and I totally agree with it. Moreover, when people passively believe that opinions by expects are correct, reliability of the content can have author effects. Since author has a big name and special education, people simply assume that what he is saying is right.
I think it could be like religion. Once we get strong believes in something or someone, it is very hard to admit that it could be gone wrong. The internet gets rid of author effects. There is no name value or other conditions to make content look like valuable or reliable. There is purely content to be judged by numerous other people. Of course, the world without experts professional journalists is pretty alarming thoughts; however, I think, monopoly of knowledge circulation is more alarming thoughts.
Reference
Keen, A (2007) ‘Truth and lies’ in The Cult of the Amateur, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, pp. 64-93.