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

Andrew Keen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780338406 ISBN 13: 9781780338408

Publisher: Constable, 2012

Synopsis

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. Praise forThe Cult of the Amateur: 'A shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with 'the wisdom of the crowd'. Keen writes with acuity and passion'. New York Times 'A staggering new book by Andrew Keen. He is an English-born digital media entrepreneur and Silicon Valley insider who really knows his stuff and he writes with the passion of a man who can at last see the dangers he has helped unleash. His book will come as a real shock to many. It certainly did to me'. A N Wilson, The Daily Mail

About this title

Review

A vital and timely book that's terrifying, fascinating, persuasive and reassuring, all at the same time. (Paul Carr)

From Hitchcock to Mark Zuckerberg and the politics of privacy, a savvy observer of contemporary digital culture reframes current debates in a way that clarifies and enlightens. (Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together)

In this timely and important book, Andrew Keen once again thinks one step ahead of social media pioneers, posing questions they will need to answer or risk facing a digital uprising. (Parag Khanna)

A voice of informed caution, a Silicon Valley insider warning against false prophets and a future that may destroy as much as it creates. (Mark Bauerlein)

Book Description

Why Social media - Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, Twitter - is bad for you.

About this edition

• Publisher: Constable
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1780338406
• ISBN 13: 9781780338408
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288