The internet is destroying us

In his book "The cult of the amateur: How today's internet is killing our culture" Andrew Keen spends the first chapter ranting about how the internet is causing people in traditional media outlets such as the news, music industry, and movie industry to lose money and jobs. He mentions multiple times the issues craiglist has caused for newspapers in lost revenue due to free classified ads. He talks endlessly about the untrained ametuers posting their opinions and media and the untrained ametuers viewing the information that has been posted.

Well, WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL AGE. Keen suggests that consumers should pay for a product simply because the people that are charging are the people who have been doing it the longest. You should pay the newspapers for circulating news and for classified ads. His reason why, they are the experts at it. They deserve to be paid huge sums of money for their expertise. Well, the internet has proven that it doesn't take huge sums of money or experts to produce content that is of interest to millions of viewers.

Keen's argument is the equivalent of saying that we should never have adopted cars as a mode of transportation. Just think of the millions of people that were out of business. The lumber jacks that cut the wood to build buggies, the farmers that bred and fed the horses to draw the buggies, the people that fixed the buggies when they broke. The invention of the car ruined the transportation industry! The spread of the internet is in the same way destroying the media industry!

According to Keen, content on the internet is created by monkies then consumed by the same monkies that are creating it. Internet publications lack the trained professonalism of an elite group of media generators. Any Joe-Smoe can be a movie critic, a news reporter, or a movie star. My response:

1. I have never had any professional training, yet for the past two years I have been hired as a sports reporter and photographer for a local newspaper. Does that make me a professional journalist? Does that make me qualified to be a sports reporter or a blogger? At what point do I cross from Amateur to professional?

2. If someone can and will do it for free, then PLEASE do it. I for one hate having to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars for their expertise when my car breaks. I know lots of people that are frustrated with the money they spend every time their computer breaks. If people wouldn't charge outrageous amounts for their services in the first place, there wouldn't be a push to find the means to provide the same service cheaper or for free.

3. You will never be able to go to dinner online. You'll never be able to obtain physical merchandise online (you can buy it there, but it still comes from someone somewhere). It will be impossible to fuel your car on the internet. So there are many goods and services that the internet can't possibly destroy people's ability to make absurd amounts of money from.

4. I prefer the advice and opinions of people that are not paid for their advice and opinions. I have found that I don't like the majority of films that are highly praised and given awards at the Oscars each year. The expert opinion is rarely my opinion so why would I PAY for an expert opinion?

It isn't up to the world to put an end to the digital age so that we can continue to pay outrageous prices to the people that have monopolized the industry and profited for years off that monopolization. It is the industries' responsibility to adopt to the fact that their model no longer works. After getting something for nothing, few people are going to readily go back to paying the kind of money Hollywood and the RIAA charge or even the small fee charged by the newspaper company.

It is a digital age. The horse and buggy are now novelties as soon might be printed newspaper and high dollar movie and music distribution.