The Amateurs' hour: is the internet destroying our culture, or is it just annoying our snobs?

• Author: Harsanyi, David
• Position: Book review

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, New York: Currency, 228 pages, $22.95

ANDREW KEEN'S website claims, without a hint of humility, that he's "the leading contemporary critic of the Internet." No kidding? The entire Internet? A curious reader might wonder whether such an all-inclusive battle is similar to taking on, say, "music" or "radio waves." It is.

More specifically, Keen's depressing book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, laments techno-utopianism, free content, and the rise of citizen journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and critics as cultural arbiters. It is a book, in other words, of spectacular elitism.

Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur turned full-time critic of user-generated Internet content, argues that our most "valued cultural institutions" are under attack from the hordes of lay hacks, undermining quality content with garbage. His central argument is--to pinch a word he loves to use--seductive. He's right that the Internet is littered with inane, vulgar, dimwitted, unedited, and unreadable content, much of it fueling outrageous conspiracy theories, odious partisan debates, mindless celebrity worship, and worse. And then there's the stuff that's not even entertaining.

Keen refuses to confess that there's even a smattering of intellectually and culturally worthy user-driven content online. If you do find something decent in the "digital forest of mediocrity," he attributes it to the infinite monkey theorem: Even simians, if permitted to indiscriminately hit a keyboard for an infinite amount of time, will one day bang out Beowulf or Don Quixote. (Silly me, I was under the impression that monkeys had hatched the idea for VHI'S Scott Baio Is 45 ... and Single.) Apparently, these monkeys are discharging so much free content into the cyber-strata that they threaten to bury culturally significant work, dilute good craftsmanship, and cost me, a journalist and "cultural gatekeeper," my job. So I guess I'd better take Keen's thesis seriously.

Keen isn't entirely wrong--of over the estimated 175,000 new blogs created each day, just a miniscule fraction are worthwhile--but in the midst of cobbling together statistics and disaster stories he ignores an otherwise promising tale of job creation, mass creativity, and the democratization of the media. He also fails to acknowledge that the rise of Web 2.0--Internet-based media, such as blogs, in which the...