The Internet is Killing Our Culture, Author Andrew Keen Complains in The Cult of the Amateur

Author Andrew Keen is not going to be happy with my review of his book, "The Cult of the Amateur." I'm not going to trash his book, but it will really bother him that I am reviewing it on the Internet.

In fact, all of us writers here on the AC have a lot of nerve to post our stories about current events, sports, hobbies, crafts and travel. According to Keen, we don't have the authority because we're not experts.

I've been in the newspaper business for 15 years, so I believe I have enough expert authority to say Keen is overreacting.

"Amateur hour has arrived, and now the audience is running the show," he says.

It's true that all of "us" (meaning every with Internet access) have the ability to write blogs, post videos and even publish books using the Internet. We can get our opinions and expertise out to the public, whereas in the past we could only be members of the audience.

This really bothers Keen, who feels that all of this free-floating content is cluttering the cultural landscape. He laments that fact that The New York Times has to compete for eyeballs and even advertising space with Joe Blog. As Keen puts it, it's "all Drudge and no Dostoevsky."

That seems to imply that papers like the New York Times have a God-given right to dominate the media landscape. The newspaper business is in a nosedive thanks to the easy access to news on the Internet. This hurts my career opporunities, since I'm trying to move up from a weekly paper to a daily paper - and my target newspaper is looking to cut jobs, not to add them.

It doesn't bother me that I am sharing this website with many writers who are not classically trained journalists. If you are the foremost authority on parenting, quilting or skydiving, then you deserve the reader's attention more than anyone else who could write about those topics.

The same holds true for books. I wrote one last year about my life as a pro wrestling announcer. My wife and I published the book ourselves using an online
publisher. In the past, I would have had to wait and hope for a publishing company to accept my book.

All of the publishing companies I submitted my manuscript to said no. Does that mean my book didn't deserve to be published? The people who bought my book really liked it, even if there weren't enough of them to put the book on the best-seller list. I also like the fact that my book is sitting on the library shelf
along with Andrew Keen's book.

Keen does have a point that the opinions and work of experts has to compete with those of millions of new "content producers." However, if the work is good
- and Keen's book is good - it will find an audience.