Blogging: We’ve Got the Power

Andrew Keen, in his recent book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting our Economy‘, argues that whilst blogs, podcasts, amateur videos and music may be harmless or sometimes even enriching forms of media, they are destroying mainstream newspapers, record companies and film-makers. Wikipedia, the popular free online encyclopedia, he describes as ‘dumb’.

He’s going head-to-head with leading authority on innovation and creativity, Charles Leadbeater, author of the forthcoming book ‘We-think: the power of mass creativity‘. This aims to understand the new culture in which people do not just want services and goods delivered to them, but also ‘tools so that they can take part, and places in which to play, share, debate with others’.

Charles Leadbetter disagrees that people are being duped. He argues that the more sources of information available, the more critical they can be.

You can go to ‘Read & Comment’ to look at Leadbetter’s chapters on-screen and leave your immediate feedback. Alternatively, you can download and print the draft text here, before returning to the site to let me know what you think:

Chapters 1–5
Chapters 6–11
Full Draft

To link to a recent article in The Times setting out the bare bones of the argument click here.

For another article on The Guardian’s Comment is here.