The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology—in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts— will enable everyone to become widely-read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.
Author: Andrew Keen | Subjects: Communication, IT | Technology, Life & Society, Miscellaneous
As the Czech sociologist Ernest Gellner argues in his classic, Nations and Nationalism, modern man is socialized by what Gellner calls a common “high culture.” The sociologist argues that we get community, cultural identity, from mainstream media. Without that high culture, without common frames of cultural references, without a common language, we slip back into the fractured village life of the pre-industrial world. Benedict Anderson, … [ Read more ]
Authors: Andrew Keen, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology