Andrew Keen’s new book DIGITAL VERTIGO out May 22, 2012
Does Mark Zuckerberg know what the word “friend” means? Why are we all becoming so addicted to Twitter? Should everyone really be broadcasting the most intimate details of their lives on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +? In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen exposes latest Silicon Valley mania: today’s trillion dollar social networking revolution that is transforming the Internet. Every new online start-up, he reveals – from commerce to communications to entertainment – is now going social in a transformation called “Web 3.0”.
In a fast-paced narrative set in London, San Francisco, Oxford and Amsterdam, Andrew Keen warns that what he calls this “cult of the social” is jeopardizing both our individual privacy and liberty. Using one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films – Vertigo – as his starting point, he argues that social media, with its generation of massive amounts of personal data, is encouraging us to fall in love with something that is too good to be true – a radically transparent 21st century society in which we can all supposedly realize our authentic identities on the Internet.
Digital Vertigo is the first substantial critique of Web 3.0. Written with his trademark humor and erudition, Digital Vertigo will make anyone who has ever questioned the purpose of Facebook or Twitter think more deeply about a social networking world in which, for better or worse, we are all now enmeshed.
“Dear Andrew – Thank you so much for your virtual BIBLE. It is the only thing I have come across that is uncompromising and clear. A work from the troubled heart. My wife is reading it through this very week and agrees with me that you have managed to bring a sense of proportion to a subject that few of us, certainly those over fifty! who feel helpless in its thrall, but not helpless enough to think that ‘those others’ may be right to assume absolute majesty. The computer is a wonderful piece of machinery, but it is in danger of becoming a barometer of our moral stance, a law maker for our shared values and a bulwark against the sheer essence of beauty that has gone before. It must never be the annihilator of human effort, the touchstone of ingenuity or the simple pleasure of making something that may have been made for a thousand years.
I wish the book such success. I have bought a dozen of them to cast abroad like benevolent ammunition on a world that would exactly go the ways you have described so eloquently….”
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