ost journalists would agree that cyberspace is not everything it could be, but Andrew Keen, a veteran of Silicon Valley, goes further. He says it has become a dangerous place for everyone except power-hungry capitalists and snooping governments and the rest of us are its victims.
His book The Internet Is Not the Answer with its comprehensive and forensic examination of how the Internet is doing bad things to our lives, is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of communications and journalism.
In an interview with The Guardian Keen underscores how the net’s free for all culture, including news, has caused havoc in the creative industries. There were promises that the Internet would come up with solutions for the crisis that has overtaken
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A generation of young people in the journalism schools in Europe and the US have few quality jobs to look forward to. Some will survive as freelancers, but many, if not most, are destined for advertising, corporate communications or public and political information jobs.
Keen’s book will infuriate some. His hard-hitting analysis of the overweening power of Google, for instance, is unlikely to impress Jeff Jarvis at the City University of New York. In his 2009 book What Would Google Do? Jarvis, a passionate supporter of market solutions to journalism and its crisis, argued that companies and individuals should study and perhaps copy Google 's methods for succeeding at internet entrepreneurship.
But it’s precisely that form of entrepreneurship which Keen, a serial Internet entrepreneur himself, has in his sights. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content. He then asked how quality content can be created in an online environment (including journalism) that demands everything for
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Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Civic Media and cofounder of the international bloggers’ website Global Voices, is another contrarian raising the alarm.
In his 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cospompolitans in the Age of Connection Zuckerman explains how the Internet has made everyone less dependent on professional journalists and editors for information about the wider