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A new book has crawled onto my summer reading list: The Cult of the Amateur - how today's internet is killing our culture.  I heard  an interesting interview with  author Andrew Keen about  the book.  He says that the vast amounts of user-generated content is ruining our culture. I have a feeling I will disagree with a lot of what he says.  I'm not the only one.  Lawrence Lessig rips into it in his blog.

But what is puzzling about this book is that it purports to be a book attacking the sloppiness, error and ignorance of the Internet, yet it itself is shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance. It tells us that without institutions, and standards, to signal what we can trust (like the institution (Doubleday) that decided to print his book), we won’t know what’s true and what’s false. But the book itself is riddled with falsity — from simple errors of fact, to gross misreadings of arguments, to the most basic errors of economics.