By now you might have seen the book The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, the contrarian book by Andrew Keen telling us that we’re sewing the seeds of destruction with Web 2.0 by being driven by the “wisdom of crowds.”

Since I’m writing a book that exalts the crowd’s ability to create something like Wikipedia, many folks have asked me what I think about his thesis.

Well the problem is, I’m not sure there is a firm thesis to his book. While I’m quite sympathetic to the idea that MySpace and inane YouTube videos might indeed be a zombie plot to eat our brains through technology, on balance the Internet and Web 2.0 have done far more to engage a new generation in writing, conversation, content creation and inter-cultural dialogue than it has to corrupt us. What I find amusing is that the Internet has averted what everyone feared in the 1980′s — comatose teenage couch potatoes transfixed in front of the TV, passively absorbing mindless programming. Yet here is Keen villifying the Internet for its engagement and interactivity to reconnect humans.
So when asked to summarize Keen’s book, I usually tell folks it’s a “loveletter to mainstream media.”

He has an immense amount of faith in the conventional media to do an unrivaled job to nurture and filter the best sources and content for the general public. (I always found this argument quite odd to make in this day and age, with the spectacular failure of the “MSM” news media in reporting accurately on the march up to the “war” in Iraq, Curveball, and weapons of mass destruction.)

The problem with Keen’s book, and his associated lecture circuit, is that too often he comes back to simply saying, “I just don’t buy it.” Whether it’s on NPR (June 16, 2007) or authors@google (Google’s guest lecturer series), he seems to retreat to this same phrase, though his British accent (with a dash of Californian) helps put some gravitas behind it.

In the NPR interview specifically, he mentions how the Internet is cause of “death of the independent bookstore” while not acknowledging this was happening well before via the arrival of megastores like Barnes & Noble, Borders and even Costco.

Keen proclaims, “I prefer the wisdom of the professional. For people who are in doubt… look at Wikipedia and then look at Britannica.” This is quite a strange argument to make. Wikipedia is in the top 10 most visited web sites in the world, and even with is quality in flux, it’s hands down more relevant and useful to the average college student than Britannica’s narrow set of subjects behind a subscription firewall.
But so far the best analysis and rebuttal of Keen’s work comes from David Weinberger, who writes an extremely detailed and thoughful work in The Huffington Post. Weinberger was one of the first folks who first alerted ordinary folks to the massive impact the Internet would have in The Cluetrain Manifesto, and his insight is incredibly forward thinking. You would do well to review their new 95 Theses.

But more importantly read Weinberger’s entire response to The Cult of the Amateur. I would argue Weinberger does a better job of summarizing Keen’s views than Keen himself.