"Cult of the Amateur" response

This article stood out to me in many ways. I thought that the “infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters” analogy illustrated Keen’s point well. Today’s technology truly does give anyone and everyone publishing capabilities with networks like youtube and wikipedia. As Keen says about blogs, “every posting is just another person’s version of the truth; every fiction is just another person’s version of the facts.” This really does blur the line between expert and amateur. This especially applies to wikipidia. I was interested by the paragraph that talked about corporations that strategically used wikipidia to spread cooperate propaganda. Both McDonalds and Wal-mart were reported deleting certain things off their wiki entries for the betterment of their image. Wikipedia is truly a perfect example of notion that “every posting is just another person’s version of the facts.” People using wikipedia to form opinions and gain knowledge are simply degrading the intelligence the “generation Y utopians.” At first I thought that perhaps reading, listening to, and watching nonsense on the internet could be strictly recreational, and wouldn’t interfere with the mainstream, traditional ways to access information, such as newspapers, magazines, etc… This article swayed me to think otherwise. Profits for major newspaper companies are down, with the New York Times decreasing 69%. One main reason for this is because people can access this information online, and for free. The traditional means of gathering information is slowly disappearing, and is being replaced with an online world in which anyone can be a publisher, “The cult of the amateur.”