Andrew Keen: “Monkey Tamer”

Andrew Keen, a well known British-American author and social theorist in the realm of information technologies and how they effect human beings interaction with each other and the formation of culture makes his distaste for user generated content clear in his book ” The Cult of the Amateur” unquestioned. Keen starts off with an introduction in which he explains how with the creation of web 2.0 and the implementation of a more user centered web experience through applications such as facebook, twitter and other recent innovations from the silicon valley is in fact making society worse. His argument stems from  a very similar argument made by the ancient philosopher Aristotle and the great American Composter John Phillip Sousa as we discussed in our previous reading. The argument that these three men share is that with the influx of amateur users created by the simplicity of web 2.0 that other more skilled processes which take time to cultivate like coding or playing and instrument  will eventually wither with time and leave us with a culture in which no new or original content can be created. Another of Keen’s arguments is illustrated within his defense of the traditional media related outlets who are being effected by the creation of more indvidually sponsored content . He believes that although giving individuals the ability to create content on their own can have potential benefits it can also reduce the amount of media literate people in society. The traditiional media outlets have resources to both gather information from vast sources and the ability to publish them in a professional manner.  Keens argument however is that then amateur are thrown into this situation without the same resources, the quality of media will decline. Many of us are aware of the saying that if you place enough monkeys in a room with a typewritter that they will eventually produce shakespear, for Andrew Keen however this statement does not hold true “with their infinite typewriters they are authoring the future. and we may not like how it reads” (Keen 9). What do you think? Are we just a team of monkeys aiming at some distant impossibility or are we actually making progress as a people?