Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us [Kindle Edition]

In 2007, before Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen published a prescient critique of Web 2.0 culture titled The Cult of the Amateur, a book that anticipated many of the problems of the web today. It was, thankfully, a runaway bestseller.

As both an accomplished academic and an internet entrepreneur, Keen was able to cut through all this self-interest and distraction and portray it as it was. He has largely been proven right. Despite proclamations that we'd all be making our living from blogs, hardly any of us do. Journalism hasn't gotten better, it's gotten worse (and less profitable). Digg is dead, long live Reddit (nobody gets paid on either). Studios are still in control of television and movies (and what we watch still sucks). Radio is ruled by a few elite stars. After all, instead of democratizing the music industry, YouTube just gave us Justin Bieber.

Thankfully, Keen is back with Digital Vertigo, a book timed perfectly with the Facebook IPO. This time his criticism is more dire, more urgent. We're no longer talking about issues of art or business but of privacy, responsibility and freedom.

Digital Vertio is an extremely well-researched book which successfully describes the ways in which our lives, both private and public, have been affected by social media. He deconstructs the most chilling aspects of our "Social Culture," drawing often terrifying parallels between our continuing loss of privacy, our growing tendency toward "groupthink," and a near obsession with documenting and broadcasting even the most trivial moments of our lives, with disturbing themes from Orwell's 1984.

The possible downfalls of a culture obsessed with social media have been discussed at length, but Keen presents a fresh angle, tying in connections to the 1960s Summer of Love, the origins of the Internet, and the Occupy Wall Street protests to create a compelling argument for a return to privacy. An eye-opening read.

`I update, therefore I am. Or perhaps, I update, therefore I am not'. Andrew Keen's Digital Vertigo provides an incisive and clear-eyed critique of the incredible force and momentum of the current online wave, where everything has to be `social'. From Alfred Hitchcock to the Crystal Palace to John Stuart Mill, Keen calls on a wide range of topics to illustrate his points and draw implications in this refreshingly contrarian account of the social web.

His characterization of unadulterated, frictionless sharing is particularly thought-provoking. Social networking services like Facebook offer the promise of greater connectedness and, in turn (hopefully), a better world. But Keen makes the argument that perhaps the opposite is true. In a world in which we share more than ever - where we are more connected than ever with more online friends - we may in fact be allowing our closest relationships and real world connections to deteriorate.

This book is a must-read for anybody engaging online with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest of todays' online broadcasting platforms. It is absolutely gripping, and reinforces every fear you might have about how these services are deeply threatening not only to our privacy, but to our humanity. As a society, we have begun to share an incredible amount about ourselves online, seemingly without concern for the complete loss of control and the permanency of the record once it's out there. This is a book that everyone needs to read. You may or may not agree with all of Keen's arguments. But you will think twice about what you do - and do not - share online.

Andrew:

Digital Vertigo is an amazing piece of work! I read the introduction before the formal release prior to leaving on a family trip to California from the east coast a couple of weeks ago. We were so busy in the early days of our trip that I didn't pick up my iPad to read again until we were, appropriately enough given the story, in San Francisco the past few days. Just arrived home last night after reading up to chapter 5 on the airplane. I swore half way through the flight that I will finally disconnect from Facebook but more importantly I am truly in awe of the depth of your scholarship on this one. The way you have woven together various time periods and what on the surface looks like unrelated material makes this one a real masterpiece, one that deserves serious attention.

Part way through the flight yesterday I was doing so much electronic underlining I finally handed my iPad to my wife and two sons (19 and 20, therefore both Digital natives) telling them they really needed to read a page to understand why I was so enthralled. [I would tell you which page but in electronic books all signposts seem to be relative based on the choice of font size and reading device.] Riding home in the car from JFK I asked my oldest son to read from Chapter 1 and part of Chapter 2. By time we were home the whole family was hooked.

My oldest son is going to be a junior in college but as a junior in high school (2009) he wrote and read in public a poem effectively denouncing Facebook and the whole social media scene he had become part of - concluding that a walk on a beautiful day or under the stars would be a better way to get to know him. It took a while but in the Spring of his freshman year of college he finally disconnected from Facebook - a true outlier in his social group. Needless to say, from the excerpts he had now read Digital Vertigo resonated deeply with him. It is now on his summer reading list as it is for my wife and 19 year old son as well.

I finished the book this AM. I remember when you were writing The Cult of the Amateur a compelling book in its own right. In retrospect, that was just a warm up. That one gave you a platform to travel the world to speak to a wide range of audiences and engage in the debates like the one in Oxford referenced in Digital Vertigo. You made a strong case in the Cult but the web needed time to mature to see if you were in the ballpark in terms of your predictions. Clearly those same years gave you time to mature, reflect and do amazing research as a supernode wannabe. This time with Digital Vertigo it is clear that you have truly arrived - you hit this one out of the park on the first pitch.

Anyone currently using Facebook, Foursquare and any other major social network needs to read this book and reflect on the future we collectively are choosing - we still have time to alter course, but not much!

Weg3
(a proud friend)