June 20 (Bloomberg) -- Andrew Keen is convinced the Internet is sending us all to hell. In ``The Cult of the Amateur,'' he inveighs frantically against the rabble he thinks is hijacking the Web. His subtitle is ``How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture.''

By ``amateur,'' Keen means every unschooled user technology has empowered to blog, post videos and write or edit Wikipedia entries. He thinks this mob is drowning out the authoritative voices of our ``experts and cultural gatekeepers -- our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies and Hollywood movie studios.''

What is more risible than a boob in high dudgeon? Only a thinker innocent of culture himself could panic over the dwindling power of the music and movie industries, or lament that ``fewer people are watching the commercials on both national and local stations that underwrite television.''

Keen sometimes unleashes his fury on the wrong target, as when he blames the closing of independent bookstores on the Internet, when for years they've been losing business to the chains. (It's the chains that are under siege now.)

He holds YouTube responsible for our ``gotcha'' political culture; Gary Hart could explain to him it goes back further. He sees the attempt to unseat Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman in 2006 as mindless malice by the ``blogosphere'' (singling out MoveOn.org, which isn't a blog), when the fury at Lieberman was over a serious issue, his support for the war in Iraq.

CD Greed

Keen writes as though the status quo were sacred, especially when it comes to profit. In the new Web culture, he demands, ``where is the money for the record industry and the recording stars?'' Similarly, ``With so many songs available for free, or for 99 cents from iTunes and the like, why would anyone pay $15 to $20 for a CD?'' I wonder, too -- though a better question is how the industry talked itself into believing the extortionary prices it used to get away with charging for CDs were set by nature, not greed.

But what really gets Keen foaming at the mouth is Wikipedia. ``It's the blind leading the blind -- infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.'' After retailing a few stories about the vast site's unreliability (I find it useful myself, though I'm never foolish enough to rely on it as a single source), he concludes that ``democratization, despite its lofty idealization, is undermining truth, souring civic discourse and belittling expertise, experience and talent.''

Trust Kings?

The indignant arguments he brings to bear against the democratization of the Web are, in fact, the same ones that worried monarchists long ago raised against democracy itself. And they were right, to the extent that it's an error-prone system liable to such debacles as the 1933 elections in Germany and the 2004 elections in the U.S.

Except that, of course, undemocratic systems are worse. Authority is never reliable (as it unvaryingly thinks) just because it's authority. When Keen asks, ``In a world with fewer and fewer professional editors or reviewers, how are we to know what and whom to believe?'' he's displaying his ignorance. There's an excellent way to know. It's called education.

To be educated is to learn to read with a healthy skepticism, so that even when so godlike an authority as, say, the New York Times swallows a bellicose government's line that a mad dictator is harboring weapons of mass destruction, the informed reader may arch an eyebrow. Some of the very worst critics around are doing their damage in highly respected newspapers and magazines, and some of the best are on the Web. It takes discrimination -- not word from ``cultural gatekeepers'' -- to tell the difference.

What's `Free'?

Given Keen's belligerent confidence in the superiority of traditional media, it seems worth pointing out that his copy editor missed several grammatical gaffes (``it is us who are faced with the task ...''); his fact checker failed to point out that ``The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' wasn't written by ``Gibbons''; and his editor allowed him to get by with prose that often sounds as though it had been lifted from brochures. (``Nothing is more important in a democracy such as ours than an informed citizenship.'' As opposed to a democracy such as whose?)

The man has a truffle hound's nose for the trite. Twice he tells us (why didn't one of those vaunted editors catch the repetition?) that the unreliable information on sites like Wikipedia ``really isn't free; we all end up paying for it one way or another with the most valuable resource of all -- our time.'' By this standard, though I received his book gratis from the publisher, it wasn't free, either.

``The Cult of the Amateur'' is published by Doubleday (228 pages, $22.95).

(Craig Seligman is the New York book critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Craig Seligman at cseligman@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 20, 2007 00:16 EDT