In the last few years, people have been talking about Wisdom of Crowds. It is nice to see that finally somebody has started warning about it — somebody has decided to say that the Emperor has no clothes.
New.com reports about a new book by Andrew Keen.
In a deliciously subversive new book, The Cult of the Amateur, which debuts in June, Keen recounts the many ways in which technology is remaking our culture and society.
But the most interesting part of the article is
The subtitle of his book states his thesis bluntly: “How the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture, and our values.”
Them be fighting words, to be sure, and Keen is being purposely provocative. But he’s worth reading. Keen’s not writing from the uninformed point of view of a technophobe. In his previous life, he was the founder of Audiocafe.com. That said, he’s not at all happy about where things are headed, bemoaning the advent of “an endless digital forest of mediocrity” as the number of new blogs doubles each six months.
This is true but society always goes thru such phases. What is needed are strong mechanisms that can do prospecting and filtering of all this data to find what is trustworthy, valuable, and reliable.