July 24, 2007
UGC Killing Our Culture. Book review
Andrew Keen hates user-generated content. The author of recent nonfiction release "The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture" believes that homemade online media is killing the economic viability and independence of quality content, replacing the Springsteens and Truffauts in our culture with a meaningless stream of low-brow distraction and product placement. The Daily Reel reports.
"He argues that the homemade media that has become such an important part of Web culture over the past few years is largely worthless, and that mass culture was of a higher caliber when the media gatekeepers had greater power to decide who would be famous and what we would all watch.
... Put simply, Keen just doesn't think everyone deserved to be famous for 15 minutes.
"We're creating a culture of resentment in which everyone thinks they have a right to some sort of cultural visibility," he says. "People don't have that right. Sure, you have a right to be seen, but you don't have any natural right to a mass international audience. You earn that right. … There's a scarcity of talent and there's a scarcity of who can be successful. The reality is that we only have a certain amount of time in the day to watch and to read to listen."
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/tv/archives/2007/07/016782.htm
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