I must confess I’ve not yet read this - will order from the local library rather than buy as having read the reviews I don’t think I’ll agree with much of what Keen says.

Just one point.

The written history of human society is absolutely tiny. The oldest written texts are only about 4,000 years old (that’s the best to be found on google).

The ‘modern world’ as we understand it is only around 500 years old. In geological time this doesn’t even register. If we look at the period of the past 500 hundred years entire industries and crafts have been developed and then disappeared. For many areas of human activity there are few, if any, first hand accounts of the experiences of the people involved.

There are certainly not hundreds, let alone thousands, of accounts of the experiences of sailors during the 200 years of expansion of sailing ships and mercantile capitalism.

There are very few books or any other written record from lead miners; coal miners; lightermen; weavers. When we look at the social destruction caused by the development of capitalism in Salford or East London or Glasgow we find isolated commentaries by historical pioneers such as Engels and Mayhew. We don’t find any diaries written by slum dwellers in Wapping, or novels written by iron foundary workers in Middlesbrough in the 19th century.

Yes, there may be a whole heap of rubbish in the 400 million or so blogs that are written. Yes, they may reflect the atomised, isolated and consumer driven culture that dominates the western world. But within this, there are different voices which just do not make it into the mainstream media.

If contemporary culture is ‘dumbing’ down it’s not because of bloggers. It’s much more to do with the likes of Endemol and Murdoch. There are a lot of criticisms that can be made of blogging - but not that the people seek to subvert and challenge the giant multi-million pound media Empires.

The point is also worth making that a very large percentage of the people who dominate the media have very questionable talent in the first place. I can easily think of people in my circle of friends who are much funnier than Graham Norton, much more challenging and polemical than David Dimbleby, have much better political ideas than Melanie Phillips (ok, that’s not very difficult). I’m sure most people can.