The Club: Andrew Keen on the Cult of the Amateur

Andrew Keen, Silicon Valley pioneer turned Web 2.0 contrarian, comes to The Club at the ICA to argue that the Web 2.0 revolution is killing our culture and undermining our economy. His controversial book, The Cult of the Amateur, seeks to expose the economic, ethical and social dangers of a digital culture where author and audience are one and the same – a culture, Keen argues, where genuine talent and expert opinion is lost in the glut of "user generated nonsense". Is Britannica indeed superior to Wikipedia? Is it that YouTube and Myspace contain few gleaming gems in a deluge of junk composed by no more than cynical PR firms and shameless self-promoters? Where plagiarism and piracy are rife, is our creative culture really at risk?

He will be in conversation with Bryan Appleyard, special feature writer for The Sunday Times, and author of The Culture Club: Crisis in the Arts, amongst others.

The talk will be followed by a drinks receptions and book-signing by the author.