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

Description: <i>In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen presents today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution and critiques of "social" companies like Groupon, Zynga and LinkedIn, Keen argues that the social media transformation is weakening, disorienting and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age, Keen says, is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.</i><br><br><img src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1332956326s/13166885.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy">Zipping down the reviews here, it appears that Mr Keen is not the best writer, however he does have some refreshing views about Social Media and all things inter-webbie. (hattip Kevin)<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1475182566i/20693016._SX540_.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><br><br><b>Willing ourselves into the Panopticon</b>: The Main Man and myself made a stab at social platforming, an experiment if you will. We signed up for both Twitter and Facebook on the vernal equinox 2016, and carried on until the fall equinox 2016, just to see what all the hullabaloo was about. Neither of us could stand the Twitter culture, and Facebook was a relative success when we had the newsfeed set to just that - a news feed. After a couple of months or so, the boy that is Mark Zuckerberg, started messing with trends and news because, apparently, that was not what he built his platform for. <br><br>This book was kept in the larder for when we had completed the six month trial and it was eye-opening, if a tad out of date. I do not feel elitist because Facebook and Twitter were not my cup of tea, neither do I feel dumb because of what others may perceive as my inability to grasp the meaning of such platforming. It may have worked better if friends and relatives had been imported <i>en masse</i>, yet, honestly, I have no wish to share what I had for tea, or where in the world I was located at any particular time.<br><br><a href="http://bigthink.com/articles/welcome-to-your-echo-chamber-popular-not-nearly-enough?utm_campaign=Echobox&amp;utm_medium=Social&amp;utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1481918258" rel="nofollow noopener">Welcome to Your Echo Chamber. Population: Waning</a>

I just finished this. I need to think what type of review I write, seeing as it has made me think so much about the internet and social networking in general, that really it could be seen as quite hypocritical to actually publish a review online using a social networking site about a book that takes strips off our social networking. Its made me think, and I think Andrew Keen is clever and quite prophetical about our technological future and the 'social' electronic direction we have taken over the past, probably, ten or so years.<br /><br />Comparative with the scientific breakthroughs of the 19thC period of extensive Industrialisation, we also are living in a period of a technological revolution on a scale that has turned upside down our social relations. Andrew Keen argues that instead of the 'social' aspects of social networking, i.e trying to make us all happy (using Jeremy Benthams Utilitarian philosophy as a sort of guide throughout) and for the greater good, that no one will ever be lonely again, it is in fact making us divorced from society at a *greater* level than what it claims the internet should be shaking off these chains. <br /><br />I like Andrew Keen's analyses, his use of 19thC ideas and philosophy, combined with using Alfred Hitchcocks famous 'Vertigo' movie as analogies of our current technological 'social' age. Are we really headed towards a disintegration of our old morality by exposing and expressing ourselves to people that we never, or probably never will meet via social networking? Its made me think a lot and I would probably have to read this book again to really grasp his message, or danger warning about our digital age.

I actually share the author's extreme skepticism of web 2.0, or 3.0 or whatever he calls it (Facebook/Twitter/G+ as opposed to Google/blogging/old-style Flickr, I guess), but the book is so terribly written -- both style and structure -- it's a waste of time and money. I don't even recommend you check this out of the library.

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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 can't tell if the writing style is a clever attempt to actually induce vertigo, or if this book is simply ridiculously badly written, but I fear it's the latter. It's as if Keen has accumulated a massive clippings file over the last few years, and writing this book was simply a giant jigsaw puzzle of arranging the headlines into something that seemed to have vague coherence, whether it actually made sense or not. It's a scattergun rollcall of Silicon Valley press-releases (many from companies that are already dead, or failed to ever gain any traction), with some 19th century philosophy badly mixed in to seem much more serious and intellectual, amongst constant references to how the author either is, or wants to be (depending on just how self-aggrandising he feels at the moment), a "super-node"[1], and a viscerally annoying habit of referring to people not by their names, but their twitter handles[2]. I have no idea who the audience for this book is meant to be, but it too often seems like it must be people sufficiently insecure about philosophy or technology to be awed by all the references, without ever noticing that there's simply no depth behind any of them. A better version of the book might use the arguments between Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (for example) as a starting point to reboot or recontextualise some of the modern privacy debates, but anyone who's already familiar with the philosophical history will find this book far too light-weight, and anyone who isn't won't really have a clue what Keen is talking about, as he does such a poor job of actually explaining it. <br /><br />The part that makes it so frustrating is that I agree with lots of his points. But this is much too important a topic to be dealt with quite so badly as this.<br /><br />----<br /><br />[1] There's a constant tension between the author not really wanting to be part of this new world, whilst craving recognition as an important figure within it. If that had actually been much more explicitly the point of the book, and treated as a serious issue, it could have been much more interesting, but as it stands it's much more like someone who constantly brags that they're the most humble man alive.<br /><br />[2] Yes, yes, their online persona is a distinct and distinctive being, yada yada yada. But please, please, please, don't let this become a trend.

This book starts out well, but then becomes nothing but a book of lists. It is obvious this writer has extensive knowledge and experience with the subject. It's unfortunate that a substantive editor couldn't help out more to focus this book into something more readable.

Virtually unreadable. Keen drones on without ever really making a point, and constantly brings up the fact that he owns a Blackberry Bold. Literally, in every single paragraph.

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/wifi-marketing-toronto-1.3988650">http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto...</a> Nearly finished the book but it'll take a while to write the review... if I do so because it'll ramble on forever. This was just in the news and follows the theme of the book.<br /><br />For those that think Facebook is the be all and end all. For those the live "online" and then complain when gov'ts and businesses use the info you leave behind.... Read it.<br /><br />Although the book may be 5 yrs old and things have changed, it's overall premise is just as important then as it is now... if not more so.<br /><br />To quote the author "I update, therefore I am not". pg 15<br /><br />Online is fiction, people come and go like characters in a book.... ironically the person that slammed me the most over that comment on LRK's previous bb... a few days later after months of daily posting, private chatting and plans to meet up... vanished.

"In our digital age, we are becoming more divided than united, more unequal than equal, more anxious than happy, lonelier rather than more socially connected." Keen<br /><br />"The completely real becomes identified with the completely fake. Absolute unreality is offered as real presence." Umberto Eco<br /><br />Hits the nail on the head. I was becoming disillusioned with the whole social networking thing, so when I heard Keen speak at a conference a couple of years ago, soon after this book was published, I sat up and listened. I finally got around to reading the book. Keen makes some good points, but I found he peppered his writing too much with "borrowed words" as he keeps telling us. Too many names of the main players in social networking industry to keep up with them. I enjoyed the book when it was Keen talking to us direct.

If you are a fan of Umair Haque, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, etc and you need some contrarian anti-dose, this book is for you. It puts you back on track for the desire of independent thinking, having your own - truly own - opinion, and being much more aware how we risk becoming sheep in herds manipulated by a few. Absolute recommendation, and a must read for anybody involved with "social" of any form and for anybody involved with Personal Data etc. It's one of the best books i have read this year. Very well researched, plenty of culture injections, playing between Bentham and Mills. A masterpiece! I read it on my Kindle. The book came to an end at 52% of the Kindle Book. The rest were foot-notes and bibliographies etc. I wanted more. Still hungry ;-)