Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us
"Digital Vertigo provides an articulate, measured, contrarian voice against a sea of hype about social media. As an avowed technology optimist, I'm grateful for Keen who makes me stop and think before committing myself fully to the social revolution." —Larry Downes, author of The Killer...
show more
"Digital Vertigo provides an articulate, measured, contrarian voice against a sea of hype about social media. As an avowed technology optimist, I'm grateful for Keen who makes me stop and think before committing myself fully to the social revolution." —Larry Downes, author of The Killer App 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.
show less
Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780312624989 (0312624980)
Publish date: May 2012
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Pages no: 246
Edition language: English
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...