I am finishing Andrew Keen's book, The Cult of the Amateur, that strikes me as the modern day equivalent of Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders.
Keen is the kind of person who would have dismissed Abraham Zapruder's 26 minutes of film as unreliable and amateurish, just because he was an accidental "citizen journalist" long before the term was coined.
He is very passionate, maybe angry, about what he sees in the old media vs new media. Some of what he observes is accurate. Meaning, much of what he says is hyperbolic, flawed. The book seems to be about the digital economy, about the downside of internet as an economic and communication platform (you know, the usual suspects: click fraud, Google bombing, anonymous Youtube videos defaming politicians etc) than about 'amateur' content showing up through new channels.
I am working on a review, because this is one book anyone interested in the progress of the digital economy must take in, albeit with a grain of salt.
But nevertheless, a good read, and proof (I hope) that I don't simply read and consume information that merely conforms to my preferences -something Keen thinks the internet forces us to do.
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