Library Web Chic

I ran into a reference to Andrew Keen’s book The Cult of the Amateur today during my feed reading. So I went to the book’s blog/website to check out about him and the book. The book peaked my interest for lots of different reasons. Mostly because I’m in the middle of writing an article about born digital materials in libraries and have been thinking about issues of information quality and cultural memory as they relate to born digital materials. As a result, I’d would really like to get my hands on the book because Keen offers a different perspective on Web 2.0. Not that I expect to agree with all of Mr. Keen’s notions, I am a believer in importance of Web 2.0 and think that it has caused some positive things to occur. At the same time there are some problems that Web 2.0 has created that many people seem to be blithely ignoring. Reading a few posts on Keen’s blog I can’t help but think that someone who makes the statement “A media with no memory creates a culture of forgetting.” can’t be all bad. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t come out until June, which won’t help me because my article that is due before then. Still I’ve added it to my “must read” list to see exactly what Keen’s point of view is and where he thinks the danger points of Web 2.0 are.