In its early days, the telephone was expected to be of most use in listening to musical concerts. If it had been, it would hardly have done much harm, despite its acoustic shortcomings: more people would have been attracted to live performances, having once sampled them remotely. When the gramophone and the wireless served this purpose better, we chuckled for a few decades at this disappointed promise. But now young people do indeed listen to music, and not just ringtones, on their telephones.
Andrew Keen is very worried indeed about the internet, not as a medium, but as an engine of destruction for our civilisation. As an Englishman (who has found a more hospitable habitat in silicon-rich California), he has surprisingly chosen ‘the cult of the amateur’ as the phrase to express his fear and detestation of what he thinks is happening. Many of us are rather sympathetic to amateurs — in sport and art and literature and coleopterology. To him ‘amateur’ goes with ‘bungling’.
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