Great Seduction with Andrew Keen

Keen, Andrew. "Great Seduction." The Cult of the Amateur. New York: Broadway Business,
2007. Print.

Keen Summary

Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur gives insight to how Keen believes the internet is killing our culture. His chapter entitled The Great Seduction delves into the Web 2.0 revolution and all the potential promise it offers, but Keen breaks Web 2.0 down into a danger that will eventually harm our society and culture. He directly relates his personal experience to further his claim that Web 2.0 has caused our society more harm than good.

He states that the Web 2.0 is a “great seduction” by offering the promising of democratized media for everybody, when in reality it is offering an essay passage way for anyone to post lies and filth online and pass it off as a legitimate source. His experience at FOO Camp is where the Web 2.0 was introduced to him. Everyone he seemed to notice was excited for this new innovative use of the Internet, when in his reality this was the demise of society’s culture. He had observed that everyone at FOO camp was broadcasting himself or herself instead of listening. Web 2.0 according to Keen opens the entire world to post anything and everything they want on the Internet whether it is worthwhile or not. Keen continues to defend his viewpoints by writing about different aspects on the Internet. He analyzes blogs and how inaccurate they can be. He also reveals how major corporations utilize blogs to their advantage and because of Web 2.0 like Walmart. Blogs, which are supposed to be used as a person’s personal space on the Web, has now become places where people, especially consumers, take seriously into the choices they are making. Big corporations have utilized this to their advantage and because of the anonymity of the Web 2.0 no one knows whether these reviews and blogs are truly coming from real consumers or are just fabricated by big corporations looking for a free public relations campaign. Another Web 2.0 aspect Keen vehemently argues against is Wikipedia. Web 2.0 supposedly embraces such sites as Wikipedia for such easy information, but Keen argues that without editing, Wikipedia could be telling everyone lies. He points out how quickly and easy it is to change information within minutes by using the deaths of Ken Lay and Anna Nicole Smith as examples. Within minutes their Wikipedia pages were updated with different stories of their deaths. This unreliable source of facts and information is what Keen is trying to show people, and that with Web 2.0 people will not be able to distinguish fact from fiction.

Throughout the chapter, Keen presents arguments against this Web 2.0, which everyone is in awe of; thus, calling it the “great seduction”. Overall, Keen provides cohesive cases that support his claim that such an innovation of Web 2.0 will hurt us more than help. The claims of that Web 2.0 will destroy our culture because people will manipulate the internet to feeding the public false information was prevalent throughout Keen’s chapter. In conclusion, Keen provided evidence and anecdotes to make his argument of the danger of Web 2.0 worthwhile.