I’ve painfully pushed my way through “Cult of the Amateur”, despite its huge flaws. As mentioned last time, the author constantly follows the “broken window fallacy” in all his economic arguments so far.

A couple of sections cover the issues of accountability in the press and the undermining of advertising. Keen offers up examples of where mainstream media have been caught out, including outright lies, poorly researched stories etc. He offers these up as examples of the higher quality of the infrastructure because of the sanctions then applied. However, the very fact that these failings exist in the mainstream media rather undermine his case, particularly as there’s no way of knowing how many flawed articles aren’t spotted. He also excoriates the self reinforcing groups “talking only to themselves”. These groups are no worse than the existing examples of biased media, for example “Fox News”. One of the differences between mainstream media and the new online media is that new media does not generally make the same claim to lack of bias, or claim to “authority” made by existing media.

Keen then goes on to decry the undermining of the advertising industry, charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce short media slots, and being replaced in part by purely amateur productions. Good art some of the “professional” advertising output may be, but I’m reminded of the Leonard Rossiter Cinzano ads where Cinzano dropped the campaign when market research showed they were some of the best know ads around but that more people thought they were advertising their main rival, Martini, and most of the rest didn’t know who they were advertising. Great television; crap value for money advertising. If an amateur film-maker can get the message across and improve product visibility better than an expensive professional then why wouldn’t a company go for them. It’s called competition, and any economist will tell you that in general competition produces a more efficient marketplace (all other things being equal).
Keen fails to have any real historical context to his book. If one looks at the early days of the newspaper business, there were many scandals, a significant amount of anonymous and pseudonymous material published, some of it highly misleading (such as Ben Franklin’s Silence Dogood letters). It took a long time before the newspaper industry achieved anything like its current state of respect, and even there it’s not without its detractors.
Keen’s approach is utterly “modern” in the sense that it assumes that existing communication structures’ viewpoints are universally valid and that anyone with no access to existing channels has nothing substantive to add. I agree there are significant problems with the explosion of Web 2.0, the time-rich mass of amateurs over-riding the relatively time-poor expert etc. However, Keen’s analysis of this is utterly flawed. I strongly recommend reading Daniel J. Solove’s The Future of Reputation instead, which deals with a slightly narrower set of issues but deals with them with a great deal more insight and nuance, and less knee-jerk reactions and arrogant assumptions.