The Cult of the Amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture, by Andrew Keen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is not a fair book, and I'm proud of the fact that it's not fair.It's designed to open a fair conversation about Web 2.0".That is how Andrew Keen described his own book, 'The cult of the amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture ', during Google Talk 2007 in Mountain View, California [12].This book both demonstrates the way the internet has evolved and highlights the problems and challenges that go along with the evolution of the internet.Keen's main message is basically this: the democratisation of media has created a new media landscape, in which the place for the serious 'old media', such as newspapers, is shrinking.Bloggers writing their own news, web-users suggesting sites on Digg.com and self-proclaimed experts adding articles to Wikipedia dominate the web nowadays.These expanding amateur-media create a culture of mediocrity, where a truly good artist or journalist does not stand out of the crowd.According to Keen, the increase in quantity of information thus causes a decrease in quality of information, thereby corrupting our culture and bringing down the expert institutions, such as professional journalism, novel writing and the music industry, which traditionally safeguard our societal values.Now, how does Keen structure his argument?On the first page of his book the author summarises the digital revolution as 'ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule.[. . .] On steroids.' [12, p. 1].Keen then argues that on the internet anyone can publish anything, generally being of poor quality.'For today's amateur monkeys can use their networked computers to publish everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to embarrassingly amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays and novels.' [12, p. 3].By now, it is clear to the reader that Keen finds this 'infinite desire for personal attention' (2007: 7) a highly objectionable development.He then devotes the majority of his book (chapters 1-7) to convincing the reader of problems that arise as a result of this democratisation of information.He points out that 'our cultural standards and moral values are at stake ' [12, p. 7] and connects this to the assertion that 'the very traditional institutions that have helped to foster and create our news, our music, our literature, our television shows, and our movies are under assault as well ' [12, p. 7].Indeed, Keen minutely exposes several fundamental problems arising on the internet: throughout the book, the reader witnesses the appearance of untrustworthy, morally objectionable and culturally debatable content, such as the worldwide spreading of home videos via You Tube, as well as criminal behaviour like identity theft, copyright violations, illegal online gambling and sexual predation.By going beyond general statements about these topics and stating real cases and statistics, Keen succeeds in convincing the reader of the seriousness of the described societal problems.In the final chapter (ch.8) he makes an effort to come up with solutions to these problems, such as more control and regulation provided by traditional political institutions and website administrators.Keen for example refers to Citizendium, a Wikipedia-like initiative where content is provided by citizens and with two principles safeguarding the quality of information.Firstly, all contributions are verified by a board of expert editors.Secondly, the editors' credentials can be checked upon, because their real names and CVs are published on the Citizendium website.By pointing to solutions like these, Keen manifests himself as an advocate for constructive use of the safeguards technology has to offer.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.022 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".