Not Another One

Posted on September 8, 2007 in Blogging The InterNet

Yet another conference, featuring another expert who hates the Internet, especially blogging:

[[Andrew Keen]], in his recent book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy’, argues that whilst blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music may be harmless or sometimes even enriching forms of media, they are destroying mainstream newspapers, record companies and film-makers. Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia, he describes as ‘dumb’.

He will go head-to-head with leading authority on innovation and creativity, [[Charles Leadbeater]], author of the forthcoming book ‘We-think: the power of mass creativity’. This aims to understand the new culture in which people do not just want services and goods delivered to them, but also ‘tools so that they can take part, and places in which to play, share, debate with others’.

Charles Leadbetter disagrees that people are being duped. The more sources of information available, the more critical they can be, he has argued.

Get this: people are writing to one another again. Does Keen believe that illiteracy and addiction to visual media is a good thing? As Bugs Bunny used to say “What a Maroon!”