EducationPR

The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture.
Andrew Keen.
Doubleday, 2007. 228 p.

The Cult of the Amateur argues that blogs and social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube are destroying America’s culture. These interactive technologies and the trends they enable are, to use Andrew Keen’s words, scary, horrible, ominous, grave, chilling, disturbing, threatening, and nightmarish.

A frequent contributor to William Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine, Keen posits an edenic world where not long ago “our collective intellectual history was driven by the careful aggregation of truth—through professionally edited books and reference materials, newspapers, and radio and television.” But now, he says, the Internet has infected our culture with mistakes and fraud.

Keen does make valid points along the way. Namely,

* It’s important to be able to distinguish between credible and worthless sources of information.

* Parents and teachers should educate kids about dangers on the Internet. Parents should set browser filters and should place their computers in a family room, rather than in the kid’s bedroom.

* Record shops and bookstores (independents and chains) have closed because of competition from online vendors and because of illegal music downloading.

* Copyright is being violated as new technologies make it easier to access and redistribute content.

* Some Internet activities like online gaming should be more heavily regulated.

But the good points that Keen makes are embedded among off-topic rants and weepy sympathy for media giants like the Disney Company and Time Warner.

And sounding at times like a Bible-waving evangelist, Keen claims that America’s moral fabric is unraveling because of blogs, wikis, and social networking sites: “The Web 2.0 seduces us into acting on our most deviant instincts and allows us to succumb to our most destructive vices. It is corroding and corrupting the values we share as a nation.” In other words, Keen uses hyperbole and misleading statements to argue that the Internet/Web 2.0 is bad because it’s full of hyperbole and misleading statements.

Keen’s favorite whipping boy is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Time and again, Keen unfairly and inaccurately portrays Wikipedia as written by clueless, irresponsible people in a vaccum devoid of fact-checkers or editors. Based on my experience, Wikipedia contributors seem knowledgeable in their subject area and contribute articles as a public service. And if Keen had ever tried to post an article there he would have soon realized that there is indeed a large cadre of eagle-eyed editors who flag errors, suggest corrections, and even remove offending material.

If Keen really believes that the Internet is truly killing our culture, he should talk with educator Will Richardson, an author and technology consultant who writes for professional education journals. Richardson has successfully demonstrated how blogs, wikis, and podcasts can be used in the classroom to engage students and to promote learning.

If Keen really thinks Web 2.0 is endangering business, he should talk with communications consultants Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson, who show businesses and public relations professionals how they can communicate more effectively using blogs, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 tools.

A few more of Keen’s silly assertions, with my responses.

“Not a day goes by without some new revelation that calls into question the reliability, accuracy, and truth of the information we get from the Internet.”

Response: Not a day goes by without some new revelation that calls into question the reliability, accuracy, and truth of the information we get from the government, from the military, and from big corporations.

“Blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music, and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’”

Response: Much of the material on blogs and Wikis is unique. Many journalists find blogging a welcome addition to their normal writing outlet. I’d suggest looking at some of the journalists’ blogs at the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles times. Musicians and visual artists with limited publicity budgets use blogs to share samples of their work and to publicize upcoming shows.

“Before Web 2.0, independent media content and paid advertising existed separately, in parallel, and were easily distinguishable from each other.”

Response: Before Web 2.0 there was payola in the record industry, corporate-sponsored TV infomercials, and paid product placement in movies.

“The CD market plummeted 25 percent between 1995 and 2005.”

Response: The CD market deserved to plummet because CDs are way overpriced. That’s part of what has driven so many consumers to find alternative ways to get music (both legally and illegally).

Books rarely make me angry, but this one did. Keen will be happy to know that the blogosphere will light up with more responses to it.

Strategies and tools for corporate blogging.
John Cass. Elsevier/ Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007.
224 pp.

John Cass blogs at PR Communications where he writes knowledgeably about industry. He’s also a fellow at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) and is past president of AMA Boston.

Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging is an informative and useful book that aims to give the reader the tools and strategies to develop expertise in how to build a successful corporate blog and to enable the reader to conduct effective corporate blogger relations. Because so many people are blogging, corporate communicators are rethinking their marketing strategies. Now that people participate in news gathering and news-making through blogs and other social media websites, Cass says, new models of sponsorship and advertising will have to be developed to follow people as they switch from traditional media to new social media websites.

He makes several important points along the way.

Blogging is about marketing. A lot of marketing is about understanding your customer’s needs and making sure that you build a product that satisfies those needs efficiently and profitably. So rather than blogging exclusively about products and services, the better strategy is to create a forum for discussing customer issues and concerns.

Blogging is not advertising. Corporate blogging is a way to cut through advertising overload, and to sustain one-on-one conversations with individuals. People read blogs because they are not about selling a product. Blogging is about listening, and involves customer service and product development.

An effective blogging campaign requires combining skills from the disciplines of public relations, journalism, online marketing, and search engine optimization. PR professionals have many of the skills and strategies needed in today’s new media world, but they still have much to learn from other professions if they are to succeed in blogging.

Cass offers many practical tips for beginners.
Develop a list of bloggers to read on a regular basis. Monitor your list of industry blogs and keep a list of keywords to find other websites, blogs, and stories that would interest your audience or that would give you the opportunity to comment. Understand that it’s important to act quickly when you see a story pop up where you can comment or write a post.

The book’s only major drawback is an apparent lack of professional editing. Cass is a knowledgeable guy, but a prose stylist he is not. And throughout, one finds errors in punctuation (that darned apostrophe) and spelling (e.g. the terms ‘captcha’ and “akismet,’ although fairly common, are misspelled).

Nevertheless, I would recommend this book, along with a couple others I’ve reviewed: Blogging for Business by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulous (Kaplan, 2006), and Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (Wiley, 2006).