Our most valued cultural institutions, Keen warns — our professional newspapers, magazines, music, and movies — are being overtaken by an avalanche of amateur, user-generated free content. Advertising revenue is being siphoned off by free classified ads on sites like Craigslist; television networks are under attack from free user-generated programming on YouTube and the like; file-sharing and digital piracy have devastated the multibillion-dollar music business and threaten to undermine our movie industry. Worse, Keen claims, our "cut-and-paste" online culture — in which intellectual property is freely swapped, downloaded, remashed, and aggregated — threatens over two hundred years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

In today's self-broadcasting culture, where amateurism is celebrated and anyone with an opinion, however ill-informed, can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or change an entry on Wikipedia, the distinction between trained expert and uninformed amateur becomes dangerously blurred. When anonymous bloggers and videographers, unconstrained by professional standards or editorial filters, can alter the public debate and manipulate public opinion, truth becomes a commodity to be bought, sold, packaged, and reinvented.

Прочитав „The cult of the amateur. How today's Internet is killing our culture“ і перше що спало мені на думку це гроші. Вірніше не гроші а те що до такої доступності Internet люди масово купували газети, журнали, книги та (хай навіть спірачені) музику, фільми, відеоігри, програми і заходячи до когось додому чи спілкуючись з кимось було видно хто нормальний пацан а хто валянок який окрім телевізора та Вєрки Сердючки нічого не споживає. Хоча книжка не про це. Хочу також зауважити що масовий доступ до Internet так би мовити демократизував доступ до культурки, знань та віртуальних розваг зробивши їх майже безкоштовними і певною мірою знецівши тому що раніше для долучення до всього цього потрібно було бути в темі, мати сякі–такі гроші і бажання витратити їх на саме на це. Між рядків читається що культурка повинна спускатися зверху від тих хто щось з себе представляє та пройшов певний відбір через освіту, визнання в певних колах і т.д. Можна проводити новий водорозділ між масою та певною елітою. Маса не лише споживає всякий шлак на YouTube та TikTok, але й повністю занурена в електронну віртуальність WWW та відірвана від фізичного виміру культурки та інформаційного споживання. Маса відкидає фізичний вимір цупко вчепившись в розумнофон постійно зʼєднаний з Internet тому що так зручніше, тому що це чи не найкращий спосіб споживання дегенаритвного розважально–інформаційного продукту і тому що це просто дешевше. Домашні бібліотеки, колекції музики і фільмів, музичні центри, відеоплеєри і т.п. речі перетворилися в певному смислі на статусні явища для окремих поціновувачів і чим далі тим елітнішими ставатимуть книжки на полицях а відсутність сотового буде розцінуватися як бунтарство.

На думку автора загальнодоступний Internet завдав нищівного удару по індустрії книговидання, виробництва музики та фільмів; журналістиці та культурі в цілому. Автор стверджує що катастрофічно зменшилися продажі і прибутки а значне число людей втратило роботу бо все що може бути переведено в електронний вигляд є безкоштовно в Internet або продається там же за смішні гроші. Розпалися профільні тусовки і звʼязок поколінь перервався бо більше не потрібно кудись ходити і спілкуватися з живими людьми — все є в Internet. Експертна думка та щось вартісне знецінилися як в прямому так і в переносному смислі і губиться в океані інформаційного шуму і посередності що продукується масою яка нарешті отримала майданчик для самовираження.

Wikipedia has no reporters, no editorial staff, & no experience in newsgathering. It's the blind leading the blind — infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers…

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What's more disturbing than the fact that millions of us willingly tune in to such nonsense each day is that some Web sites are making monkeys out of us without our even knowing it. By entering words into Google's search engine, we are actually creating something called "collective intelligence," the sum wisdom of all Google users. The logic of Google's search engine, what technologists call its algorithm, reflects the "wisdom" of the crowd. In other words, the more people click on a link that results from a search, the more likely that link will come up in subsequent searches. The search engine is an aggregation of the ninety million questions we collectively ask Google each day; in other words, it just tells us what we already know. As traditional mainstream media is replaced by a personalized one, the Internet has become a mirror to ourselves. Rather than using it to seek news, information, or culture, we use it to actually BE the news, the information, the culture.

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The claim to be all about "social networking" with others, but in reality they exists so that we can advertise ourselves: everything from our favorite books & movies, to photos from our summer vacations, to "testimonials" praising our more winsome qualities or recapping our latest drunken exploits. Newspapers & newsmagazines, one of the most reliable sources of information about the world we live in, are flailing, thanks to the proliferation of free blogs & sites like Craigslist that offer free classifieds, undermining paid ad placements. Those of us who still read the newspaper & magazines know that people are buying less music, too. Thanks to the rampant digital piracy spawned by file-sharing technology, sales of recorded music dropped over 20 percent between 2000 & 2006. In parallel with the rise of YouTube, Hollywood is experiencing its own financial troubles. Domestic box office sales now represent less than 20 percent of Hollywood's revenue &, with the levelling off of DVD sales & the rampant global piracy, the industry is desperately searching for a new business model that will enable it to profitably distribute movies on the Internet. Old media is facing extinction. But if so, what will take its place? Apparently, it will be Silicon Valley's hot new search engines, social media sites, & video portals. The monkeys take over. Say good-bye to today's experts & cultural gatekeepers — our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies, & Hollywood movie studios. In today's cult of the amateur, the monkeys are running the show. With their infinite typewriters, they are authoring the future. And we may not like how it reads.

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I call it the great seduction. The Web 2.0 revolution has peddled the promise of bringing more truth to more people—more depth of information, more global perspective, more unbiased opinion from dispassionate observers. But this is all a smokescreen. What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. Moreover, the free, user-generated content spawned & extolled by the Web 2.0 revolution is decimating the ranks of our cultural gatekeepers, as professional critics, journalists, editors, musicians, moviemakers, & other purveyors of expert information are being replaced ("disintermediated," to use a FOO Camp term) by amateur bloggers, hack reviewers, homespun moviemakers, & attic recording artists. Meanwhile, the radically new business models based on user-generated material suck the economic value out of traditional media & cultural content. For the real consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, & a chaos of useless information. One chilling reality in this brave new digital epoch is the blurring, obfuscation, & even disappearance of truth.

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Truth, to paraphrase Tom Friedman, is being "flattened," as we create an on-demand, personalized version that reflects our own individual myopia. One person's truth becomes as "true" as anyone else's. Today's media is shattering the world into a billion personalized truths, each seemingly equally valid & worthwhile. This undermining of truth is threatening the quality of civil public discourse, encouraging plagiarism & intellectual property theft, & stifling creativity. When advertising & public relations are disguised as news, the line between fact & fiction becomes blurred. Instead of more community, knowledge, or culture, all that Web 2.0 really delivers is more dubious content from anonymous sources, hijacking our time & playing to our gullibility. This blurring of lines between the audience & the author, between fact & fiction, between invention & reality further obscures objectivity. The cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader & writer, between artist & spin doctor, between art & advertisement, between amateur & expert. The result? The decline of the quality & reliability of the information we receive, thereby distorting, if not outrightly corrupting, our national civic conversation.

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Of course, every free listing on Craigslist means one less paid listing in a local newspaper. Every visit to Wikipedia's free information hive means one less customer for a professionally researched and edited encyclopedia such as Britannica. Every free music or video upload is one less sale of a CD or DVD, meaning one less royalty for the artist who created it.

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On today's Internet, however, amateurism, rather than expertise, is celebrated, even revered. Today, the OED and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, two trusted reference volumes upon which we have long relied for information, are being replaced by Wikipedia and other user-generated resources. The professional is being replaced by the amateur, the lexicographer by the layperson, the Harvard professor by the unschooled populace.

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It's not exactly expert knowledge; it's common knowledge… when you go to nuclear reactor on Wikipedia you're not getting an encyclopedia entry, so much as you're getting what people who know a little about nuclear reactors know about nuclear reactors and what they think common people can understand.

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So what do we get in exchange for free amateur content? We get, of course, what we pay for. We get what the great thinker and writer Lewis Mumford called "a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance." Today's editors, technicians, and cultural gatekeepers—the experts across an array of fields—are necessary to help us to sift through what's important and what's not, what is credible from what is unreliable, what is worth spending our time on as opposed to the white noise that can be safely ignored.