Andrew Keen

Cult of the Amateur

Andrew Keen is an author and new media entrepreneur. He is the author of the international hit CULT OF THE AMATEUR: How the Internet is killing our culture. Acclaimed by The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani as having been written “with acuity and passion” and by A.N. Wilson in the London Daily Mail as “staggering”, Cult of the Amateur has been published in sixteen different language editions and was short-listed for the 2008 Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award.

As a pioneering Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He was the executive producer of the new media show “MB5 2000” and, between 2001 and 2007, worked as a executive at several Silicon Valley based technology start-ups including Pulse, Santa Cruz Networks, Pure Depth and afterTV. Andrew was educated at London University where he was awarded a First Class Honours Degree in Modern History, as a British Council Fellow at the University of Sarajevo and at the University of California at Berkeley here he earned a Masters Degree in Political Science. Andrew is currently writing a second book entitled DIGITAL VERTIGO: Anxiety, Loneliness and Inequality in the Social Media Age which will be published in 2011 by St Martins Press.