Cult of the Amateur- More like Cult of the Professional

Reading Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur is making me much more cynical than I have ever been.  And not just about life itself, but about my life in particular. 

  In all of my PR classes I am taught that the new social media craze is an excellent marketing tool for us.  I am starting to believe that maybe marketing is being used as a euphemism for manipulation.  The internet allows anonymity, where PR practitioners or advertisers or CEOs of companies can pose as an average Joe (or Jane) and blog about how awesome a product is- and there readers will never know they are getting paid to say that. Andrew Keen is convinced that most of the internet is people posing to be something they are not, he is right but he has got it the wrong way.  Yes, people are pretending to be doctors and college professors when they are nothing but  a pre-pubescent middle school boy, but there are also advertisers and PR professionals posing as stay at home moms who give you home remedies for illnesses(which the companies products.) 
This "Web 2.0" revolution has not only lent that spotlight to anyone with internet access, it has also allowed for false information and lies to be spread much more fluently and quickly.  As I read Cult of the Amateur I feel guilty, because this falseness of truth effects me every day.  I admit, I go to Wikipedia for many of my questions.  I usually take the information as fact, although it may not be.  While people who write traditional encyclopedias are trained experts in their fields.  It's pathetic that my most trusted source of information is written by anonymous users, whose motives to tell the truth may be skewed.  Being a PR major I am taught to manipulate information that would usually be taken as advertisement into fact.  My professors tell me that there are wrong ways to do PR and right ways to do PR.  I think the right way is to skew unpleasantness in nicer ways and the wrong way is to skew the unpleasantness in nicer ways so the public thinks we mean something completely different. When we are able to hide behind usernames why not take the easy way out?  It's a lot easier for people to like you if you lie to them - as long as they never find out your lying. 


Andrew Keen constantly refers back to The Long Tail   by Chris Anderson.  It's interesting because as I am reading Cult of the Amateur, in which keen condemns Anderson's work, I am also reading The New Rules of Markerting and PR which commends Anderson's work.  One of the main rules of this 'long tail' of PR is to participate, not propagate.  By participating in the internet the PR practitioners are supposed to throw away old rules of press releases and PSAs and move on to blogs and comments, where there identity may or may not be revealed. In The New Rules of Marketing and PR David Meerman Scott says that PR has once again become public, instead of just focusing on the media.  If by public, he means anonymous than yes- that is true.  For my PR classes we experiment with the new social medias in PR perspectives- making blogs supporting businesses, making Facebook client pages and of course playing around with Google algorithms to make sure we are the first thing the searcher finds, even if we weren't what they were looking about. We are practicing manipulation techniques.  I think I always knew that, but I am just bringing this to surface now.  There is no longer a right and just way to do PR.  And if there is- not many people are doing it anymore. 

Well if "Web 2.0" is not about originality, it is about falseness and copying.  People pretend to  be something they are not, and compromise the integrity of human nature by posing as someone they are not.  The loss of the physical being and physical interaction has made my future career so much easier. 


Maybe I need to reconsider what I want to do for the rest of my life.  I sure as hell don't think I am going to be the one to change all of this.