Andrew Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture,” is the talk of Internet blogs these days. The software entrepreneur reportedly argues (I haven’t read the book yet, just reviews) that amateurism, encouraged by the lax atmosphere of the Internet, is lowering the standards of our culture in every respect, from our understanding of general information to our appreciation of the arts.

To be sure, when information and culture are open to anybody’s input, no matter their honesty, skills or knowledge, the chaff is going to mix pretty heavily with the wheat. Keen points out that, for example, anyone can go to Wikipedia, the most popular online encyclopedia, and write or alter an entry. I haven’t tried this, but I suppose that means it’s possible to make up a fictitious subject, write something about it, and post it as if it were truth. Or maybe not. Wikipedia brandishes a pretty strong verifiability statement on its home page; one assumes some level of vetting. In any case, Wikipedia clearly lacks the bona fide scholarship of, say Encyclopedia Britannica, which also has an online presence but which receives a tiny fraction of the hits enjoyed by Wikipedia.

Early in the existence of the Internet, I learned to be open‑minded yet skeptical when perusing the Web. I recall an early search for Web pages on the choreographer Nijinsky that led me to a page purportedly written by someone whose father had played violin in the pit orchestra of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913. This was around 1996, so it was possible, I calculated, that someone in their 70s might indeed be relating the reminiscences of a father who played that gig as a young man. I read with interest about the politics of the pit orchestra, and the anticipation with which the musicians received their parts to the strange, modern score by Stravinsky. And then came the kicker: “All the musicians admired Nijinsky. She was a beautiful woman.”

Nijinsky, of course, was a man. Somebody was just having fun.

Seeking information on the Web requires alertness to such funkiness. But what about talent on the Web? How can we know the real thing from the other stuff? Not from numbers of hits. Go to YouTube and click on the most‑viewed videos there. Once you’ve waded through commercial promos for films and recording artists, you can find some of the worst and most pretentious music of all kinds with tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of hits. This means that pure junk has more listeners, thanks to the Internet, than high‑quality music being made at your local college, community center, or garage. Popularity on the Internet is a matter of access and publicity. Quality is not a factor.

So Keen has a point, which I look forward to seeing him develop in his book.

But while junk clogs up the Internet, it’s also possible to make wonderful discoveries there. The responsibility for deciding what’s quality or not rests on your shoulders, not on the half a million people who’ve watched something called “Should I Give My Son a Beer?” on YouTube. Here are three recent discoveries I made at YouTube:

1. Search for “Women in Art” and get set for an amazing three minutes that redefine “morph.” Watch as the faces of women over several centuries of Western art change smoothly and rapidly from one astounding portrait to another, ranging from Leonardo to Renoir and beyond. (Three million‑plus hits.)

2. For those of us devoted to the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, there is incredible video footage of “Someone in a Tree” from the original 1976 Broadway production of Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures.” This powerful but obscure work is rarely staged and has never been filmed, so this is a treasure. (More than 3,000 hits.)

3. Look for “Greg and Kamel improvise classical music.” This is a cello‑piano duo that plays together so much and with such integrity that they can pull off a completely improvised 3‑minute piece that has melodic invention, formal cohesion and rhythmic vivacity. (About 11,000 hits.)

You might also try this game. Simply start with any artist you wish to search for. Once you’ve chosen and viewed a video, choose some other artist mentioned or used in the first video and view a video of them, etc. Soon you have a chain of videos connected by the artists in them, a kind of Six Degrees of Artists separation. Sooner or later, though, you’ll run into a dead end. The object of the game is to keep it going for as long as possible.

For instance, I started the game by searching for “Shakespeare” and discovered a Beatles skit from 1964 spoofing the Pyramis and Thisbee scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Bizarre. So next I searched for John Lennon and found him reading from his book, “In His Own Write,” introduced by ... Dudley Moore. A subsequent search for the star of “Arthur” found Moore in an early TV sketch accompanying himself at the piano while he sang a setting of “Little Miss Muffitt” in the style of composer Benjamin Britten. The search for Britten located a video of someone singing the composer’s setting of W.H., Auden’s poem, “Stop All the Clocks,” which sent me on a search for Auden. My chain ended with the next video, a short reading of an Auden poem by an anonymous YouTube user.

Like any other major innovation, the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. On the bright side, it can be a window into culture, for good or ill. On the downside, it can be the biggest distraction since television.