If you loved Wikinomics, you’ve got to read Andrew Sheen’s “The cult of the amateur.” It forces your brain to take a compare the seductive arguments about knowledge democratization, and the decline of social values as a result of user-generated content.

On the face of it Sheen is a cross between Vincent Bryan Key (Subliminal Seduction) and Neil Postman (Amusing ourselves to death) both warning about the dangerous trends in advertising (in 1974), and television culture (in 1986) respectively.

He sees the internet as the slippery slope of literary, moral and cultural standards, and seems to try hard to relate it to amateurism. Indeed, the struggle between old media and its receptacles, versus new media and the infinite pores out of which this new content is flowing is easy to cast as one between the good guys and the baddies.

But it’s not, and I discuss why, here in my detailed review of the book, at ValleyPRblog.