Andrew Keen - CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How today's Internet is killing our culture

Friday, July 13th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/213650/

ABSTRACT:
In its annual "person of the year" issue, Time Magazine reflected a shift in our culture by electing "YOU" in place of the traditional leaders and thinkers such as FDR, Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. Thanks to the democratization of the internet and what is now known as Web 2.0, anyone with a computer is given equal footing and the ability to be heard. In today's self-broadcasting world, if you have an opinion, you can publish a blog, post a video on YouTube, or alter an entry on Wikipedia. But is this really such a good thing? Audiocafe.com founder and Silicon Valley insider Andrew Keen describes how Web 2.0 threatens our culture's moral and aesthetic standards. What's more, Keen argues the deluge of free, user-generated content is threatening the very viability of our traditional media and our cultural institutions. 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 Craig's list; 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 200 years of copyright protection and intellectual property rights, robbing artists, authors, journalists, musicians, editors, and producers of the fruits of their creative labors.

BIOGRAPHY:
The San Francisco Chronicle wrote "every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen." Andrew is indeed the leading critic of today's Internet and his CULT OF THE AMATEUR is the first book that critically exposes the consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution. Andrew was educated at London University, where he got a First Class degree in History. Today, he is host of afterTV.com and regularly appears on television and radio. His writing can be found on ZDNet.com and Britannica.com, and in traditional publications like the Weekly Standard, Fast Company and Forbes.

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