Andrew Keen
Encyclopedia
Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur
and author
. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet
culture and the Web 2.0
trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier
and Nicholas G. Carr
among others. Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.
, North London
. He attended the University of London
, studying History under Hugh Seton-Watson
, a British historian and political scientist. Keen earned a bachelor's degree
in history and then studied at the University of Sarajevo
in Yugoslavia. Having been influenced by Josef Škvorecký
, Danilo Kiš
, Jaroslav Hašek
and especially the writings of Franz Kafka
; Keen relocated to America, where he earned a master's degree
in political science
from the University of California, Berkeley
, studying under Ken Jowitt
. After Berkeley, Keen taught modern history and politics at Tufts University
, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst
. Keen continued academic teaching while he developed a parallel career as a popular cultural critic and began utilizing the Internet in the early nineties. He currently lives in Berkeley, California
, with his family.
. The firm folded in April 2000 and after the demise of Audiocafe.com, Keen worked at various technology companies including Pulse 3D, SLO Media, Santa Cruz Networks, Jazziz Digital and Pure Depth, where he was director of global strategic sales.
In 2005, Keen founded AfterTV, intended to bring clarity, understanding and foresight to the post-TV-centric media and consumer landscape. Keen stated in October, 2007, that he is working on his new book, tentatively titled, Star Wars 2.0.
is a "grand utopian movement" similar to "communist society" as described by Karl Marx
. He states:
On June 5, 2007, Keen released his first book The Cult of the Amateur
, published by Doubleday Currency, and gave a talk at Google the same day. The book is critical of free, user-generated content
websites such as Wikipedia
, YouTube
, Digg
, Reddit
and many others. In a BBC World Service documentary on Wikipedia in 2011, Keen recommends vigilance when reading Wikipedia, “Wikipedia should be the place you go to familiarize yourself with a product, or a subject, or an individual. But you should always go with a deep degree of skepticism assuming that the information is by definition unreliable, or incoherent, or badly written or simply wrong.” He prominently featured in the 2008 Dutch
documentary
The Truth According to Wikipedia
and was also featured in the 2010 American
documentary Truth in Numbers.
Keen stresses the importance of media literacy and claims that user generated blogs, wiki's and other "democratized" media, can't match the resources of mainstream media outlets. Pointing to examples like being able to gather teams together, travel to dangerous locations (sometimes spending years in the region) and having skilled and experienced editors oversee the process. Keen forecasts that if the current web 2.0 mentality - where content is either given away or stolen - continues, in 25 years there won't exist a professional music business, newspaper industry or publishing business and challenges his audience to question whether we value these or not.
Keen discusses often-overlooked problems with participatory technology. He describes the Internet in amoral terms, saying it is a mirror of our culture. "We see irreverence, and vitality, and excitement. We see a youthfulness. But we also see, I think, many of the worst developments in modern cultural life, and, in particular, I think we see what I call digital narcissism
, this embrace of the self. It's Time magazine's person of the year for last year was you." Keen is also heavily critical of anonymity on the Internet, believing that it makes us behave worse, not better. He says: "The Web's cherished anonymity can be a weapon as well as a shield."
Showing that misbehavior using anonymity has been so widely adopted, new definitions such as "trolls
" and "sock puppets
" have emerged.
He is not without his critics on this. Tim O'Reilly
has said "I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy to sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants", saying this perhaps in response to Keen's critic of him in his book, "O'Reilly and his Silicon Valley acolytes are a mix of graying hippies, new media entrepreneurs, and technology geeks."
Keen currently writes about media on his site thegreatseduction.com, which redirects to his blog
. Keen also produces a podcast
on AfterTV.
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...
and author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
culture and the Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier
Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality .A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves...
and Nicholas G. Carr
Nicholas G. Carr
Nicholas George Carr is an American writer who has published books and articles on technology, business, and culture. His book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.-Career:Carr originally came to prominence with the...
among others. Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.
Life
Keen was born in HampsteadHampstead
Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...
, North London
North London
North London is the northern part of London, England. It is an imprecise description and the area it covers is defined differently for a range of purposes. Common to these definitions is that it includes districts located north of the River Thames and is used in comparison with South...
. He attended the University of London
University of London
-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...
, studying History under Hugh Seton-Watson
Hugh Seton-Watson
George Hugh Nicholas Seton-Watson , was a British historian and political scientist specializing in Russia.-Early life:...
, a British historian and political scientist. Keen earned a bachelor's degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in history and then studied at the University of Sarajevo
University of Sarajevo
The University of Sarajevo is the first university in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was originally established in 1531 as a Madrasah or Islamic Law college, with a modern university being established and expanded on top of that in 1949. Today, with 23 faculties and around 55,000 enrolled students, it...
in Yugoslavia. Having been influenced by Josef Škvorecký
Josef Škvorecký
Josef Škvorecký, CM is a leading contemporary Czech writer and publisher who has spent much of his life in Canada. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country...
, Danilo Kiš
Danilo Kiš
Danilo Kiš was a Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer and poet who wrote in Serbo-Croatian. Kiš was influenced by Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Ivo Andrić, among other authors...
, Jaroslav Hašek
Jaroslav Hašek
Jaroslav Hašek was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and socialist anarchist best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into sixty...
and especially the writings of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
; Keen relocated to America, where he earned a master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...
in political science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, studying under Ken Jowitt
Ken Jowitt
Kenneth "Ken" Jowitt is an American political scientist. He is currently the Pres and Maurine Hotchkis Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, positions he has held since 2001 and 1995...
. After Berkeley, Keen taught modern history and politics at Tufts University
Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university located in Medford/Somerville, near Boston, Massachusetts. It is organized into ten schools, including two undergraduate programs and eight graduate divisions, on four campuses in Massachusetts and on the eastern border of France...
, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public research and land-grant university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States and the flagship of the University of Massachusetts system...
. Keen continued academic teaching while he developed a parallel career as a popular cultural critic and began utilizing the Internet in the early nineties. He currently lives in Berkeley, California
Berkeley, California
Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
, with his family.
Career
Keen returned to Silicon Valley in 1995 and founded Audiocafe.com, which received funding from Intel and SAPSAP AG
SAP AG is a German software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, with regional offices around the world, SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software...
. The firm folded in April 2000 and after the demise of Audiocafe.com, Keen worked at various technology companies including Pulse 3D, SLO Media, Santa Cruz Networks, Jazziz Digital and Pure Depth, where he was director of global strategic sales.
In 2005, Keen founded AfterTV, intended to bring clarity, understanding and foresight to the post-TV-centric media and consumer landscape. Keen stated in October, 2007, that he is working on his new book, tentatively titled, Star Wars 2.0.
Criticism of Web 2.0
In 2006, Keen wrote that Web 2.0Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
is a "grand utopian movement" similar to "communist society" as described by Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
. He states:
On June 5, 2007, Keen released his first book The Cult of the Amateur
The Cult of the Amateur
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture is a 2007 book written by entrepreneur and Internet critic Andrew Keen...
, published by Doubleday Currency, and gave a talk at Google the same day. The book is critical of free, user-generated content
User-generated content
User generated content covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies. It entered mainstream usage during 2005 having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles...
websites such as Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, Digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
Reddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...
and many others. In a BBC World Service documentary on Wikipedia in 2011, Keen recommends vigilance when reading Wikipedia, “Wikipedia should be the place you go to familiarize yourself with a product, or a subject, or an individual. But you should always go with a deep degree of skepticism assuming that the information is by definition unreliable, or incoherent, or badly written or simply wrong.” He prominently featured in the 2008 Dutch
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
documentary
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
The Truth According to Wikipedia
The Truth According to Wikipedia
The Truth According to Wikipedia is a Dutch documentary film about Wikipedia directed by IJsbrand van Veelen. The documentary examines the reliability of Wikipedia, and the dichotomy between usage of experts versus amateur editors...
and was also featured in the 2010 American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
documentary Truth in Numbers.
Keen stresses the importance of media literacy and claims that user generated blogs, wiki's and other "democratized" media, can't match the resources of mainstream media outlets. Pointing to examples like being able to gather teams together, travel to dangerous locations (sometimes spending years in the region) and having skilled and experienced editors oversee the process. Keen forecasts that if the current web 2.0 mentality - where content is either given away or stolen - continues, in 25 years there won't exist a professional music business, newspaper industry or publishing business and challenges his audience to question whether we value these or not.
Keen discusses often-overlooked problems with participatory technology. He describes the Internet in amoral terms, saying it is a mirror of our culture. "We see irreverence, and vitality, and excitement. We see a youthfulness. But we also see, I think, many of the worst developments in modern cultural life, and, in particular, I think we see what I call digital narcissism
Narcissism
Narcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...
, this embrace of the self. It's Time magazine's person of the year for last year was you." Keen is also heavily critical of anonymity on the Internet, believing that it makes us behave worse, not better. He says: "The Web's cherished anonymity can be a weapon as well as a shield."
Showing that misbehavior using anonymity has been so widely adopted, new definitions such as "trolls
Troll (Internet)
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response...
" and "sock puppets
Sockpuppet (Internet)
A sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception. The term—a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock—originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about himself while pretending to be another...
" have emerged.
He is not without his critics on this. Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media and a supporter of the free software and open source movements.-Life and career:...
has said "I find, Andrew Keen's, his whole pitch, I think he was just pure and simple looking for an angle, to create some controversy to sell a book, I don't think there's any substance whatever to his rants", saying this perhaps in response to Keen's critic of him in his book, "O'Reilly and his Silicon Valley acolytes are a mix of graying hippies, new media entrepreneurs, and technology geeks."
Keen currently writes about media on his site thegreatseduction.com, which redirects to his blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
. Keen also produces a podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
on AfterTV.
External links
- Andrew Keen's blog
- AfterTV podcast
- AudioCafe.com, circa 1998 via Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...