Since I stated posting blog entries I have received [...]]]> I could spend a lot of time reviewing each absurdity of this book, but alas I like to branch out more. Instead I think in my final reflection I’ll finish with why I believe Mr. Keen has this sense of reality that I do not share.

Since I stated posting blog entries I have received many comments such as “Stoss, you really think about the world in a fucked up way.” And I agree. I tend to think about things differently. I am not near arrogant enough to think my opinion is the only one, or necessarily correct. To paraphrase a quote from The Truman Show _{(highly under-rated movie)}: “We all live in the reality with which we are presented.”

About 3 months ago I went on a date with a smart, pretty, 20-something professional in the bio-medical field who lives by herself away from her family. On the surface you might think we are very similar. We are both white-collar workers, we are independent, well traveled and have the means to sustain ourselves. The topic came up as to how often we order take away. I said not that often, usually just Friday night curry or something. She gasped! “Once a week?! That is really often!”

At the time we had a quick laugh and moved on, but the above story is directly related to this book. I live in a reality where once a week takeout is not only normal, it is considered infrequent. That being said, lately I also live in a world where if I am not on 4 or 6 airplanes in a month I consider it “downtime”.

The point I am trying to make is that in Mr. Keen’s reality the Internet is the culprit for the downfall of society. I am sure he truly believes that and I wouldn’t fault him on it. In my reality the Internet is one of, if not the most important technological advances ever and has potential to propel society in directions we cannot even fathom yet.

The later part of the book has a couple themes. One is human behaviour and the other is the disadvantages to an all electronic society.

Keen blames sex addiction on the vast amount of porn on the Internet. Sex addiction? The only purpose for us to exist is for sex. Monogamy, humility, these are man-made concepts. Sex addiction is fundamental to our existence. The fact birth control, condoms, abortion were invented just helps us to not over-populate the shit out of this planet. Just think, if they diverted the attention give to the industry of preventing pregnancy to a field like cancer, how would this world be different?

Our realities did meet in a few way though. Keen talks about the information gathering on the net and the potentially disastrous effects it could have if it leaks. I agree. I find it very spooky when I log into Facebook in Germany and my ads are in German, or when I land in type in www.google.com in Switzerland and get directed to www.google.ch.

What if every search, every online purchase and every website you ever visited was somehow displayed to the world? Would you be embarrassed? Would losing the expected anonymity of the Internet be detrimental to your life?

Now the big brother view is that the Information Superhighway has CCTV cameras at every metre to watch you, track you and record your every move. The truth is that this is nothing new. Credit card companies have been data mining your information for decades to find patterns and anomalies to help them prevent credit card fraud. For the most part these measures are there to help you. It lets Google know when you search for Mustang, do you mean horse or car. It lets Amazon recommend books to you to save you searching or when you are stuck for a choice. But as I discussed earlier, all technologies have the ability to be used for nefarious purposes.

How is it different that you have a subscription to a gardening magazine and that magazine sells your address to gardening supply stores so they can send you mail, than Facebook putting up a “singles in the UK” ad on my page because I am listed as single and living in the UK?

The ironic part of all of this discussion is that at the end of bashing amateurs, saying that we can have no idea when someone isn’t a paid professional on a subject if they are telling the truth or lying, the author admits in the final pages of his book that he himself is an amateur, that this is first book and he had to rely on several others in writing it. Think about that for a bit.

Mr. Keen clearly sees the Internet as something vastly different than any previous technology. I do not. I see it as an advancement, sort of like VHS->DVD->Blue Ray.  If Keen took the time to think about this in the grand scheme of our society and not in the individual case studies (The Internet poker player who robs a bank to pay off his debt, or the German teenagers who faked a political message on YouTube etc) he would see we are no worse off at all. We have just transitioned to a new form of culture, economy and values, not destroyed them at all.

Bottom line: I am glad I read this book. I hated it page after page, but sometimes it takes something that you hate for you to reflect on why you like something.

We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid.  Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people [...]]]> Chapter 3 – 5:

We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid.  Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people kill people all people kill people…

It is also the start of what appears to be this author’s favourite way to make a point… putting several questions in a row at the end of a paragraph to make you “think” about his ideas, as opposed to proving his ideas.

Does anyone remember Bree or lonleygirl15 as she was known on the web? He uses this interesting example of a new type of entertainment as an example that: “We’re never sure if what we read or see is what it seems”. Is a videoblog of a 16 year old girl who turned out to be an 18 year old actress really the best example of falsehood that we can find? How about the current Swine Flu “epidemic”, in 1st world countries no one has even died from this “epidemic”, in fact the only deaths have been in Mexico and of the 150 possible cases, only 20 swine flu deaths have even been confirmed! But wait! The fact we are in an epidemic and should be panicking all across the world is something paid, non-amateur writers are discussing, guess I better go by my $0.02 face mask! That will guarantee my health!

The next 2 chapters were sad. Mr. Keen tells us the sad story of his favourite record store going out of business and blaming it entirely on iTunes, and illegal file sharing. The sadness of his friends who will miss the choice and wisdom of the employees and how nothing will ever be the same… You know what? GET OFF MY LAWN. Things change. The vast majority of people prefer to pick and choose their songs. And in fact, this is nothing new… remember mix tapes? Isn’t that a collection of favourite songs, akin to an iPod play list? We have simply made the transportation mode more efficient. It is sad that the we won’t have the wisdom of a music geek’s opinion on music, but hell we get Ebert’s opinion on movies every day and ignore him.

Let’s think of the radio. Here is a technology that music companies embrace, but yet isn’t that really delivering their artist’s art to billions of people for “free”? The music companies found a way to make that profitable. Keen pulls out of his ass the beautiful (and smelly) estimate of 20 billion songs being illegally downloaded in a year. Coincidentally, I this comes from the RIAA’s wonderfully amazing calculation that 40 songs are illegally downloaded for every song legally paid for on the Internet. Let’s do some math. The current belief is 24% of people in the world have some sort of internet connection. 6 billion people on the planet, therefore 1.44 billion people have internet. That means every person who has access to the internet anyhere in the world has downloaded 14 illegal songs and ~ 1/3 of a song legally. Plausible? Keen even refers to the legal download industry’s $1.1 billion a year business as “paltry”!! We live in a world where $1.1 billion is paltry? What is paltry is the number of companies to jump into this space! At $1.1bn if 3 companies each took 33% of the market they would be $400million companies. That means all 3 companies would be on Forbe’s list of the 400 most profitable companies! Hardly paltry.

None-the-less I am not condoning illegal activities, but the truth is that all technology can be copied and shared. The Internet simply provides a convenient way of doing so. As we have seen so many times before, fighting the Internet is futile. Embrace the technology and you can share your piece of a $1.1bn business space.

His next topic is of course video. Same argument really. A comment I really enjoyed was his quote: “Blockbuster [is] already hedging their bets by planning downloading services of their own”. Hedging bets?! I call that a smart CEO who is making good decisions. Give that guy a $90mil bonus!

There is a common theme in this book so far. Besides the fear-mongering, Internet is out to kill all things attitude, it is that everything is better if the person is professional at it. ie. I am no good as a writer because I don’t write as a profession. The entertainers on YouTube cannot provide good entertainment as they are not professionals. He deals in so many absolutes. I tend to believe this world isn’t absolute. I keep saying adapt to technology, but in reality I am aware this isn’t possible, and definitely isn’t a short term move. The point is that amateurs have their place in our society. Some of the best magic, juggling, entertainers I have seen were street side performers in squares and parks. That doesn’t mean they should all start websites and YouTube channels. Amateurism is a title and not an indication of skill. Let’s compare Susan Boyle to WIlliam Hung. Both of them are stars and relative amateurs, but I think that is too easy of a point to have to spell out.

Lately a phenomenon has taken off like many of the fads of the 80s we all love so much. Starting with the BBS systems in the late 70s and through the 90s we have had this intrinsic need to network with people at any distance via computer. With the web becoming more accessible, network [...]]]> Preface:

Lately a phenomenon has taken off like many of the fads of the 80s we all love so much. Starting with the BBS systems in the late 70s and through the 90s we have had this intrinsic need to network with people at any distance via computer. With the web becoming more accessible, network speeds getting faster and the advent of many advanced web technologies we have seen phases like Classmates.com, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and we are now looking at Twitter and the even weirder Omegle where you can (advantageously?) talk to a total stranger.

An ongoing trend throughout this advancement has been the Blog. Starting as Usenet threads and advancing to Weblogs and containing everything from political updates to fart counters, there has never been an outlet for expression that has been utilized by so many people. Useful or not, they are a social medium that won’t soon disappear.

Now, I am the very first to admit that many of these are time wasters and marketing gimmicks. I am also the first to admit that many people live too much of their lives collecting MySpace friends and looking up old highschool classmates that they would never speak to in any other capacity. And finally I will admit that there are heinous and illegal uses for each of these technologies. BUT, and let me be very clear on this, that doesn’t mean that they do not have a place in the social paradigm that any individual wishes to maintain.

And this brings me to my Easter weekend trip to a bookstore to find something to enjoy on my upcoming slew of flights. In my search for Malcolm Gladwell’s new Outliers, I found a fluorescent orange cover with the caption “how blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values“. What a strong statement that is. Not only grouping together the 60+ million blogs as 1 entity, but comparing them to the pre-teen obsession that is MySpace and the completely different medium that YouTube boasts. Immediately Andrew Keen had grabbed my interest, as I am sure he intended to, and I decided that “the cult of the amateur” was a book I needed to read.

Now, I like to think I have an open mind. I enjoy a debate, and am always willing to try and understand why people have a certain point of view, regardless if I agree with it. And in fact Mr. Keen even reminds his readers to keep an open mind as he has been described in various media as everything from “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”  to “The Martin Luther King of the Internet counterreformation”.  Intrigued yet?

You will notice I have labeled this post as ‘part 1′, I have done so for the following reason: Never in my adult life have I ever put down a non-fiction book before reading it through. I am currently on page 45, half way through the 2nd chapter and have already considered doing so. This man takes generalizations and blatantly false information and is trying to sell them as the demise of society. Since I do not want to break my streak, I vow to read this book and write about any interesting subjects I can find, positive or negative I will try and form an objective opinion to post here. Today it is mostly negative…

The Forward to Chapter 1:

Mr. Keen continually refers to all blogists as monkeys and relates blog entries/writers to “T. H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem”. (The theory that “If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters they will eventually write a ‘Great American novel’”) Aside from the fact that it has been proven that Huxley did not come up with this phrase at all, blogists are in no way random and their intent is not to come up with the ‘Great American Novel’. Blogging is a medium to project thoughts, express opinions, dabble with poetry/art, offload stress, among many other things, but not on that list is any intent to write a piece of work that will be recognized by a publisher, let alone compete with Shakespeare or Fitzgerald.

He then goes on a rant about Wikipedia and how with no editors, no reporters and no expertise in reporting necessary to join: (I am quoting this as it is so preposterous)

It’s the blind leading the blind – infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.

What?! Firstly, it is not the intent of Wikipedia to educate. Wikipedia is very clear that it is edited by anyone and no credentials are necessary. If people are misusing Wikipedia for education instead of entertainment that isn’t the fault of Wikipedia or a cause of social breakdown. In fact it is the exact opposite! Social breakdown is causing people to mistake entertainment for news. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia! Our education system has taught laziness and hasn’t updated to the new age we are in. Education has to change to support the media available. Like in my Economics class using the Internet to gather real time statistical data about the world stock markets to learn real world examples of market trends as opposed to using Wikipedia to find vague averages, or Google to find Forbes’ lists.

Mr. Keen also claims that every post on Craigslist for free is taking away paid jobs at newspapers and that every Wikipedia reader is taking away money from Brittania… Again, setting aside that I am sure most local papers won’t post a request for a hot MMF ass orgy, and Encyclopedia Brittania contains no episode guide list for Futurama, I guess my small and simple point is that the audiences aren’t the same! I am sure the Venn Diagram looks like the MasterCard logo, but the overlap is not significant enough to impact large organizations like New York Times or Grolier! The decline in the circulation of newspapers and the sale of encyclopedias is attributed to the fact that people don’t read the morning newspaper, and don’t want a bookshelf of facts from A-Z that has the weight of a locomotive! Say what you will about the fact that people work 20 hours a day, check their Blackberries non-stop and require up-to-the-second news sent via txt msg, it is where we are. Adapt to it! Utilize the technology that is here to stay, don’t complain that it is stealing from you. Yes, video killed the radio star, and DVD bitch slapped VHS, no one at Sony yelled about technology changing, they made a different product! And comedians, musicians, newsmakers are more popular and wealthy then they were!

So, did you make it through that? I apologize for the long entry.  I am sorry that I am destroying our economy, culture and values, but as long as I continue to read this book I will do my best to keep that destruction down to the minimum… oh and yes, I get the irony that I am reviewing a book whose thesis is anti-blog in a blog…