Keen vs. Lessiq

Reading Cult of the Amateur the past two weeks has been quite interesting. On my own I was less interested then once we began discussing some of the issues in class. The author Keen argues against Web 2.0 throughout the book while throwing in a few other issues as well. One person Keen uses in attempt to support his argument is Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford. After reading Lessig’s sometimes hard to follow counterpoints I decided to stick with my initial reaction to Cult of the Amateur. Therefore I find Lessig’s arguments against Keen’s book much more convincing.

As I said before I sometimes had a difficult time differentiating between what was fact and what was personal in Lessig’s counterpoints. But I still found that the issues he chose to address were very similar to the original problems I had with Keen’s argument. Particularly Lessig’s counterpoints analyzing “The Expert Fallacy,” as well as “The Amateur Fallacy.” The discussion of experts and people requiring “taste” in order to know what is high or low culture is absolutely ridiculous to me. I do not require someone to determine whether the movie, TV show, or song that I like is good or bad. Also the amateur argument was particularly interesting to me; because while I agree with all of Lessig’s counterpoints this was the one argument that Keen made that resonated with me. I do not agree with anonymity on the internet because of the potential negative consequences that can occur.