KEY POINTS:
Bloggers are notoriously touchy so it's unlikely they'll respond with restraint to the comparison that opens Andrew Keen's polemic. Adapting the "infinite monkey theorem", Keen, a British media commentator based in California, says the updated typewriting primates are not producing Shakespeare, they're deluging us with "everything from uninformed political commentary, to unseemly home videos, to amateurish music, to unreadable poems, reviews, essays and novels".
It's not a fashionable statement in this super-connected era when Goliaths in every sector of the media are groaning and creaking before a billion interconnected young Davids. We are in thrall to Google and Wikipedia, addicted to Facebook and YouTube, but Keen, who was a bright-eyed Silicon Valley prospector before the dotcom crash, is making no apologies for his loss of faith.
It isn't simply the flood of banality that worries him: it's the prospect of our cultural economies collapsing under the weight. He doom-mongers rather indulgently at times, but his horror story is still compelling.
A lot of Keen's fears are familiar and valid. The music industry is on its knees. We can never be quite sure about what we read on Wikipedia. We worry about Google abusing our confidences.
It's the way Keen ties these concerns together that makes this book worth taking seriously, and few can dispute the need to critique this enormously powerful tool which we like to believe is fully in our control.
Unscrupulous corporations, scam artists and smut peddlers rank high on Keen's offenders list. It's when he takes a moral standpoint that his grip on the argument loosens. Many complaints are valid - stronger regulations should exist to protect children from adult content and sexual predators - but the screechiness of tone begins to grate.
* Published by Nicholas Brealey Publishing
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