One cult I don’t want to belong to

A former Silicon Valley executive thinks the Internet just may be destroying our culture; after reading his book, it’s hard to disagree

A few months ago in this space, I wrote a column introducing the term, “CICO,” which stands for “Crap In, Crap Out.”

Of course, the acronym is not a new concept. But I was applying the term to the new “Social Media”—where millions of bloggers and podcasters and vidcasters, many of whom have no training, talent, judgment or experience, are all busily creating scads and scads of “content” on the Internet.

My column mostly focused on the silliness of it all. With so many people creating so much lousy crap, I mused, it was getting harder and harder to find anything good on the Internet.

But where I see silliness, at least one other person sees outright menace. Andrew Keen, a former Silicon-Valley entrepreneur, has written a book about the social media phenomenon titled: The Cult of the Amateur. It’s a catchy title, but what really got me to give the book a second glance at Borders was the subtitle:

“How today’s Internet is killing our culture.”