CYBERSPACE is now distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasise user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing.

Digital utopians are heralding the dawn of a new era, one that ushers in the democratisation of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees.

Yet as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen points out in his provocative new book, The Cult Of The Amateur, Web 2.0 has a dark side as well.

Keen argues that 'what the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment'.

In his view, Web 2.0 is changing the cultural landscape, and not for the better. By undermining mainstream media and intellectual property rights, he says, it is creating a world in which we will 'live to see the bulk of our music coming from amateur garage bands, our movies and television from glorified YouTubes, and our news made up of hyperactive celebrity gossip, served up as mere dressing for advertising'.

This is what happens, he suggests, 'when ignorance meets egoism meets bad taste meets mob rule'.

This book is a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gate-keepers and replace experts with the 'wisdom of the crowd'.

Although Keen wanders off his subject in the later chapters of the book, he writes with acuity and passion about the consequences of a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation, are wilfully blurred.

For one thing, he says, 'history has proven that the crowd is not often very wise', embracing unwise ideas like 'slavery, infanticide, George W. Bush's war in Iraq, Britney Spears'. The crowd created the tech bubble of the 1990s, just as it created the disastrous tulipmania that swept the Netherlands in the 17th century.

Keen also points out that Google search results - which answer 'search queries not with what is most true or most reliable, but merely what is most popular' - can be manipulated by 'Google bombing' (which 'involves simply linking a large number of sites to a certain page' to 'raise the ranking of any given site in Google's search results').

Keen writes that it's easy for misinformation and rumours to proliferate in cyberspace. For instance, the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia (which relies on volunteer editors and contributors) gets way more traffic than the website run by Encyclopaedia Britannica (which relies on experts and scholars), even though the interactive format employed by Wikipedia opens it to postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent. This year it was revealed that a contributor who had edited thousands of Wikipedia articles was a 24-year-old named Ryan Jordan, not the tenured professor he claimed to be.

Since contributors to Wikipedia and YouTube are frequently anonymous, it's hard for users to be certain of their identity - or their agendas.

Keen argues that the democratised Web's penchant for mash-ups, remixes and cut-and-paste jobs threatens not just copyright laws but also the very ideas of authorship and intellectual property.

He observes that as advertising dollars migrate from newspapers, magazines and television news to the Web, organisations with the expertise and resources to finance investigative and foreign reporting face more and more business challenges.

And he suggests that as CD sales fall (in the face of digital piracy) and the music business becomes increasingly embattled, new artists will discover that Internet fame does not translate into the sort of sales or recognition enjoyed by earlier generations of musicians.

'What you may not realise is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,' Keen writes. 'Our culture is essentially cannibalising its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.'

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE

HIDDEN COST

'What you may not realise is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune. Our culture is essentially cannibalising its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.'
SILICON VALLEY ENTREPRENEUR ANDREW KEEN