Far from increased accessibility, web 2.0 is only serving to harm media and creative industries, argues Andrew Keen

From even a brief conversation it is clear that Andrew Keen is passionate and enthusiastic about the impact of the internet and we're not talking about the happy-clappy enthusiasm demonstrated by tech executives who have been drinking the special Silicon Valley Kool Aid.

You see, Keen is a former Valley insider that has dared to suggest that the emperor is not wearing any clothes. His book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, has tapped into the zeitgeist unlike any other recent treatise on culture.

Although ostensibly about the internet, and in particular how Web 2.0 with its emphasis on user-generated content, group decision making and community building is harming culture, Cult of the Amateur is not really about technology at all. It is a passionately argued plea for consumers to wake up and realise that the internet is harming the established business models of media and the creative industries.

Keen admits it is "the kind of book you make your mind up about before you have read it", but he passionately believes society as a whole needs to have a reasoned debate about these issues.

With closures of record companies, newspapers and independent bookshops on the rise, he believes the imperative is to have this conversation before it is too late.

"I am not a luddite - I live on e-mail - and I am not encouraging government intervention, but if this keeps happening, governments will have to intervene," he explains.

Of course, Web 2.0 advocates say that blogs and wikis (a tool for creating collaborative documents) are all about opening up conversations to anyone with an internet connection. And in particular that these tools have changed the way companies communicate with customers and other stake-holders, as the traffic is no longer one way and a disgruntled customer can get as much attention as an official statement from a major corporation.

It's not a view that washes with Keen. "There is no debate amongst [the bloggers] - they just use the internet to confirm what they believe," argues Keen.

His critics, of which there have been many, say Keen's own use of the new technologies - he has a blog The Great Seduction (andrewkeen.typepad.com) - undermines his argument.

In his defence he says that his blog is a promotional tool for his book and he concedes that there are a limited number of quality blogs being published.

He firmly believes that writers and other creative types who put their works online should be financially rewarded for it. "I am against the idealism of free media - the idea that people would produce high quality media for nothing is ridiculous," says Keen. In fact, he goes so far as to say that media consumers have been ceded too much power by large media organisations who feel obliged to serve up "20-second soundbites of truth" that can be easily digested.

Keen believes that media consumption requires effort by consumers and initial effort by editors and they also shouldn't expect to get it for free.

While proponents of blogging and other new media tools have created a caricature of mainstream media (denoted by the acronym "msm"), one criticism that can be levelled at Keen is that his media landscape, which is populated by quality heavyweights like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, does not reflect the media at large.

It is tabloid newspapers that have the lion's share of the market globally and news organisations like Fox News and Al Jazeera, while being at the opposite ends of the spectrum, make no apologies for their political views.

"I don't bash consumers in the book because that would be totally self-defeating," says Keen. "But we are all responsible for this. When we buy USA Today rather than the Wall Street Journal, it's a collective act of cultural suicide."

Equally he says pornography and gambling are so widespread on the net because there is a market for them.

Although he claims to be on the left politically, Keen is not in favour of publishing-on-demand services that enable self-publishing authors to print off miniscule print runs to meet demand. "If everyone has a book published it loses all value," says Keen.

But the entrepreneurs who are driving the Web 2.0 movement, particularly technology publisher Tim O'Reilly, come from a technology background rather than a culture one, according to Keen. Ironically it was in 2004 at O'Reilly's FooCamp, an exclusive gathering of Silicon Valley techies, that Keen formed the view that not only were the Web 2.0 cheerleaders deluded, but their view of democratisation via the internet was going to create a new cultural elite. O'Reilly is credited with inventing the term Web 2.0, and last year proposed a blogging code of conduct following death threats received by a female blogger in the US.

Fundamentally, Keen believes that far from making the media and culture more democratic, Web 2.0 principals will make culture more exclusive.

He gives the example of Prince who recently announced his intention to focus on live events rather than his studio recordings. Subsequently he gave away copies of his new studio album Planet Earth with the Mail on Sunday. The average concert ticket for an artist of Prince's calibre can easily cost over €100 while a CD generally retails for less than €20. Keen believes this is bad for the average person because as a result it costs them significantly more to listen to Prince. "The music industry has not been ideal but it has done a pretty good job," says Keen.

Keen's views fly in the face of another recent book, The Long Tail, a theory of how the web is changing the economics of media consumption and creation by providing infinite choice. It's author, Wired editor Chris Anderson, believes that digital distribution means a much larger back catalogue of music, books and film can be made available to consumers allowing niche content to be economically provided. But Keen believes this massive range of choice will only benefit the elite.

"We are media insiders, we know our way around the internet. We can find the high quality blogs that are out there. We know that Wikipedia is not reliable and that you have to pay for reliable content. We know that YouTube is not really serious, it's just a bit of fun. But the new generation doesn't, that's the core of it. As more people come onto the net who are less versed in traditional media and who are less educated, they will believe everything they will see."

"When you do away with filters, editors and gatekeepers, there is no way of knowing the reliability of any website," says Keen. Keen claims that he doesn't get much hate mail and has many appreciative letters from teachers and librarians. However, in a recent post on his own blog he rounded up some of the labels that have been cast at him and concluded he's a "disgraceful, fascist, luddite, communist, control-freak, monarchist, failed dotcom entrepreneur".

You get the feeling that if that became his epitaph, Keen would be quietly pleased.