DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION,
FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES,
AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA.
Course:
ONLINE JOURNALISM
Topic:
A CRITICAL REVIEW OF ‘’DIGITAL VERTIGO, HOW TODAY’S ONLINE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IS DIVIDING, DIMINISHING AND DISORIENTING US’’ BY Andrew Keen
BY
GROUP NINE (9) MEMBERS
LECTURER: Mall. Mohammad Hashim Suleiman
DATE: July, 2017.
LIST OF GROUP NINE (9) MEMBERS
ANCHE JOSEPH U13MM1049
NUHU USMAN U13MM1195
SULE-OTU AISHAT OHUNENE U13MM1132
IBRAHIM AMINAT ASABE U13MM1139
COMFORT JOHN MSHELIA U14MM2006
MUSA AHMED TIJANI U13MM1184
ABDULKAREEM IBRAHIM BABATUNDE U14MM2021
JEREMIAH SAMUEL WAKIRWA U13MM1135
BARDE YARGATA VICTORIA U13MM1153
BELLO HAUWA MUHAMMAD U13MM1006
ABOLARIN MARION ABOSEDE U13MM1022
AMINU D. CHUMARO U13MM1206
MADUGU AMACHON YUSUF U13MM1150
ABU MARIAM IDRIS U13MM1108
JOHN OYIZA ELIZABETH U13MM1125
BAJEH MUFIDAT IDOWU U14MM2004
HADASSAH ABUBAKAR U13MM1114
ANTENYI E. GIFT U13MM1066
ABUBAKAR ZAINAB U13MM1115
SANUSI UMAR FARUK U13MM1193
ABDULRAZAQ NINIOLA U13MM1168
NI’IMA ANWAR RASHID U13MM1201
SAFIYANU AMINAH FAUZIYYAH U13MM1192
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Keen is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose writing on culture, media and technology have appeared on top national dailies of the world. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Audiocafe.com. He is also the host of the acclaimed internet show, AfterTv and frequently appers on radio and television, Keen lives in Berkeley, California. His other works include The Cult Of The Amateur: How The Internet Is Destroying Our Culture And The Internet Is Not The Answer.
ABOUT THE BOOK
DIGITAL VERTIGO is a Two hundred and forty six (246) paged book, which is divided into eight chapters (8), with further notes and index. It was published in 2012 in the United States by St. Martins Press 175 fifth Avenue, New York, with the ISBN number 978-0-312-62498-9.
Introduction
HYPERVISIBILITY
A man who is His own Image
This book explains to us using Jeremy Bentham how through the use of social media we have subjected our privacy to the viewing eye of the public.
Here, Jeremy Bentham who in his will wrote that his body upon death, be dissected and preserved, and to be used as exhibition in the University of London.
Just like him, who has become an art of exhibition on the street of London, we humans through the use of social media, have consistently put our lives and privacy out.
The Author Andrew Keen, who in his other books is so against us exposing our private life, saying the internet makes us behave worse, not better. The Web cherished anonymity can be a weapon as well as a shield showing new definitions such as trolls and sock puppets have emerged.
He explains that we have treaded and put ourselves on permanent exhibition on a place called the Social Media.
He furthermore explains that rather than the social media being the second life, it is becoming life itself. Andrew Keen explains his experience and questions how there could be privacy behind a public corpse. What he wanted to know, had led The Hermit of Queens Square place, as Bentham liked to call himself best known for his greatest happiness principle that human beings are defined by their desire to maximize their pleasure and minimize their plain to prefer the eternal glare at public exposure over the everlasting privacy of the grave?
Andrew explained that his work being a Silicon Valley worker included grabbing peoples’ attention on twitter and facebook, so that he can become ubiquitous. He is an influence, a wannabe Jeremy Bentham- what futurist calls a super node the vanguard of the workforce that, they predict, will increasingly come to dominate the twenty first century digital economy.
He explained that by broadcasting my location, my observation and my intentions to my electronic network, enabled him to perpetually live in public. By putting your location online youre opening yourself to vulnerability, wide range of people can actually track you to your location, by putting an observation, that is just an extension of who you are, and the general public can actually see through you.
He recalled going back to London, a place he studied, his interest laid in the metropolis, what the Anglo-American writer Jonathan Raban calls the soft city of permanent personal reinvention, rather than in pictures of dead artists. It was a day off duty, from the glare of public speaking, his opportunity to briefly escape from society and be left alone. His illegibility that afternoon thus represented his liberty. Freedom meant nobody knowing exactly where he was.
At Oxford, he debated Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Silicon Valleys most prodigious progenitor of online network who said that after he graduated Stanford, his plan was to become a professor and a public intellectual, Haffman once confessed that is not about quoting Kant, its about holding up a lens to society and asking who are wet and who should we be as individuals and a society But I realized academics write books that 50 or 60 people read & he wanted more impacted to get more Impact, Haffman magnified the lens with which we look at the society. Instead of writing books for so 60 people, he created a social network for 100 million people that is now growing by a million new members every ten days.
The real heart of our conversation- indeed, the central theme of the whole silicon valley comes to oxford event-had been the question of whether digital man would be more socially connected than his industrial ancestor. In contrast with my own ambivalence about the social benefits of the virtual world, Haffman dreamt openly about the potential of today’s networking revolution to bring us together.
The shift from a society built upon atoms to one built upon bytes, the archangel publicly insisted at our oxford debate, would make us more connected and thus more socially united as human beings.
The Future Will Be Social
Keen here recalls as king biz stone, what exactly is the future?
Biz replied saying the future will be social. The social will be the killer app of the 21st century.
Given that the internet was becoming the connective tissue of 21st century life, the future-our future, yours & mine and everyone else on the ubiquitous network- would, therefore, be yes you guessed it (social).
The new world of social media world, from social journalism, to social entrepreneurship to social commerce to social production to social learning, to social consumption to social consumers on the social graph an algorithm that supposedly maps out each of our unique social networks.
But also, he wondered that what still remained a mystery to him was, why would Jeremy Bentham want to be seen by never ending procession of strangers, all peering into his beady eyes to excavate the human being behind the corpse?
Why do we want to be seen by wide range stranger everyday all in the name of social interaction, still remains a mystery to him.
Yes it seems real so perfect that it seems as if alive but the more I started, the less I could see as to what made him human.
Juan Stuart Mill, Englands most influential thinker of the 19th century, thought of Bentham as a sort of human computer, able to add up our appetites and fears but incapable of grasping anything beyond the strictly empirical about.
Chapter One: A SIMPLE IDEA OF ARCHITECTURE
The Inspection-House
With the beginning of the twenty-first century, the digital century comes with a familiar problem from the industrial age, which is a social threat against individual liberty.
Jeremy Bentham in 1787 designed what he called a simple idea in architecture to improve the management of prisons, hospitals, schools and factories. Robin Evans described Benthams idea as a vividly imaginative synthesis of architectural form with social purpose. Bentham wanted to change the world through this new architecture. In a series of open letters written from the little Crimean town of Krichev, Benthams sketched out his plans for what Aldon Huxley described as a plan for a totalitarian housing project. He and his brother, Samuel, placed the medieval goal in the citys castle with a building designed to supervise prisoners every moment and control their time down to the very minute.
Benthams simple idea of architecture went beyond just prisons. It represented a prediction of an industrial society sophisticatedly connected by an all-too-concrete network of railroads and telegraph lines.
Nobody except Bentham himself wanted to become individual pictures in this collective exhibition. Therefore the industrial man struggle to be let alone, as George Simmel, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century German sociologist and scholar of secrecy, recognized, the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. Therefore, great critics of the nineteenth and twentieth century have all tried to shield individual liberty from the omniscient gaze of the Inspection-House. Foucault warned, Visibility is a trap.The hero of the critics of the mass industrial age is the individual who tries to protect his invisibility, who just wants to be let alone by the technologies of the mass industrial age.
Our Age of Great Exhibitionism
With the dawn of the digital era, Benthams simple idea of architecture has returned. Today, as the web evolves from a platform for impersonal data into an internet of people, Benthams industrial Inspection-House has returned as a digital twist.
The internet today is that ever expanding network of networks combining the Worldwide Web of personal computers and other devices in which around a quarter of the globes population have already taken up residency. In line with the views of Jeremy Bentham, Keen came up with what is called digital architecture, which means, the new nervous system of the planet, the backbone that every online activity depends on, transforming digital technology from being a tool of second life into an increasingly central part of real life. Keen describes the online environment in their broadest and deepest sense. He views social media in direct contradiction to the notion of privacy. He quoted Jullian Assange that the internet is the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen and has ever existed. He referred to Facebook as containing all vital information of the people. People have no privacy in what they do. You will be known for who you are at any given time with the internet.
Neal Gabler says that we have become information narcissists utterly disinterested in anything outside ourselves. Neal and other scholars like Twenge, Campbell, Aboujaoude, Strauss and Franzen, believe that people are now living there lives online, to be known and gain recognition by others which can be referred to as self-love.
Andrew Keen posited that all we, as individuals want to do on the network, is to share our reputation, our travel itineries, our war plan, our professional credentials, our illness, our confessions, photography, sexual habits and thereby making online environment transparent.
The Dial Tone for the 21st Century
The dream of creating an ubiquitous social network into a reality, the aim of driving vociferously the revolution of social interaction an global connectivity, is being actualized according to Keen by a horde of social entrepreneurs and digital business moguls. Reid Hoffman, Biz Stone and Mark Pincus alongside Facebooks founder Mark Zuckerberg belong to a certain class of entrepreneurs who according to Keen have imbued in them a certain mix of communitarian aura and financial greed, which makes them gaze into a five year horizon when the whole world will have become a twenty-first-century version of Benthams inspection-house, and era which arguably one could say we reside in presently. To drive his point and message home directly and more explicitly, Andrew Keen invokes Pincus prediction that connectivity will become the electricity of the social epoch-so ubiquitous that it will be invisible and so powerful that it threatens to become the operating system for the entire twenty-first century.Indeed as Andrew has tried to point out, the social dial tone of this period coined by Pincus has a beep that is increasingly difficult to evade.
Several start-ups and already bourgeoning companies all geared towards the integration of business and profit maximization within the social structure and continual interaction within people of the global community has been scrutinized by Keen quite elaborately. The wealth being created, the amazing ground being broken by the advancement of social technology, the rate of growth for younger social media companies all around the world is described by Keen as jaw dropping. In the discourse of Andrew Keen, trying to explain extensively the metaphor of the dial tone within the existential realities of social media and its growth as well as advancement within these modern days, the rate of growth is described as jaw dropping. This growth being mentioned here can be easily quantified using statistical figures for understandable representation and numerical value. Foursquare, a company which resides in silicon valley alongside google, Tumblr, Quora and other technologically based companies have gained values that have overtime shown the might, power and developmental capacities of the internet and the various services which are rendered via it, elevating the ideological knowledge derive-able from the notions regarding the inspection house. The blogging site Tumblr, was growing by a quarter billion impression every week in early 2011, Instagram (a social photography platform) reached 2million users in only four months since its late 2010 launch. These are all examples portraying the growth pace, profit margin, power of inclusion and the might which these platforms are acquiring as a result of intensive drive for unfettered globalization and the promotion of all identifiable products within mans environment in the process of socialization.
Important to note here also, is the creative impulse of Reid Hoffman, channeled towards the production of a web 3.0 age, which has its central driver of the internet innovation within this product to be the integration of personal data- renamed by social media marketers as our social graph into online content.
The power and might of socialization is reckoned by Keen, which is evident in his subscription to the fundamentalism that social eventualities are perceivable as that tidal wave that, for better or worse, is flattening everything in its path.
Conclusively, the simply architecture of the digital inspection-house is now all around us, and the evidences are quite numerous. The ideologies which are being propagated by several networks online have over time continued to degrade privacy and enthrone the death of it. These are Keens thoughts as contained in his words. The fundamental messages now are embedded in the rhetoric of Has Nineteen Eighty-four finally arrived on all of our screens?, the vigilance and the inquisitiveness of all humans most now come to play, questioning happenings and restricting our acceptability of social revolution products. The privacy of every human is sacrosanct; the quintessential question now lies in the probing of our thoughts to verify a necessary truth from the answer to the question: Are we ready to cede our privacy away and accept the repercussions?
Chapter Two
The author started with the word Ownlife meaning individualism and eccentricity. That George Orwell probably would agree with quitoxic that the future is always sooner and stranger than we think. Orwell in 1984 said in principle a party member had no spare time and was never alone except in bed also it was assumed that when he was not working, eating or sleeping he would be taking park in some kind of communal recreation.
Orwell coined another neologism facecrime saying that it was terribly dangerous to let your thought wander when you were in a public place or within a range of telescreen that it is simple things that can give one away like a habit of muttering to yourself, suggests having something to hide. An improper face expression or pretence was a punishable offence; today it is becoming unfashionable and even socially unacceptable not to express oneself on the network.
The author explained that things that exist in todays age of great exhibition are what an American novelist Walter Kirn calls a vast of prankish Little Brothers equipped with devices that puts as much surveillance technology in each of our hand.
The twenty-first century technological technology where personalized social networks are thus according to Curtis, the natural center of the world. The network are like social eyes, so that everyone become a cube in the wall both watching and being watched by every other cube. The ideal of privacy is taken for granted and is made to a dominant cultural norm whereby we telescreen ourselves for everyone to watch.
The age of networked intelligence the author used the web 3.0 and John Doyeris third wave technological innovation in which wire intelligentsia seeking to reboot the human condition and increasingly transparent network. Umair Haque argued in Harvard Business Review that the internet was to rewire people, communities, civil society, business and state through strong and meaningful relationship which is the future of media lies.
In 2010 Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams argue in their book Macro Wikinomics that internet today represent a turn in history and that we are moving in the age of networked intelligence which is equivalent to the birth of a modern nation-state. They said human mind can collaborate and learn collectively making much emphasis on Mark Zuckerbergs vision of the social media revolutionary impact on the broader economy.
This intelligence has made the public sphere more public than ever before and at times forces one personal into public views. Brian Steller the Time social media explains. The author said that social media quixotic are wrong that the internet is resulting in a new age of networked intelligence, and that the reverse may well be true taking the facebook and other social medias are creating social conformity and herd behavior. John Stuart in defense argued that men arent sheep. And yet on social media we seem to be thinking and behaving more and more sheep just like what Neil Strauss a cultural critic describes it as the need to belong, rather than genuine non-conformity, the rule.
A speech titled Lets Get Naked: Benefits of publicness versus privacy at a conference by the Southwest in march 2011. Jeff Jarvis argued that the social media revolution is returning us to a preindustrial oral culture where we share more and more information about our real selves and that this publicness for him will result in more tolerant society because everything is know about everyone. He posted on a blog post saying that the best solution is to be yourself.
Jarviss advice to get naked is just silly metaphors about life on the digital network. The social media can be seen as an avenue that encourages those complete lacking integrity to wreck the reputation of innocent people. Among instances he gave one of them is a Rutgers student called Dharan Ravi tweeted of them on September 19, 2010 about his dorm roommate Tyler Clement Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into Mollys room and turned on my webcam, I saw him making out with a dude Yay. A few days later Ravi had skyped a live video feed of Clementi making out with a dude the young man posted on his facebook page: jumping off the GW bridge sorry. The body of the violinist, a victim of what Walter Kirn calls Little Brother in the form of a prying roommate with a camera, was found in the Hudson River underneath the George Washington Bridge by the police. Andrew Keen the author then put it that the viral tools of mass exposure seem to be making society not only more prudent and voyeuristic, but also fueling a mob culture of intolerance, schadenfreude and revengefulness.
Jeff Jarviss call to get naked and broadcast of individuals honest opinions are on the network results not in forgiveness or more personal integrity, but instead in unemployment, criminal charges and public humiliation.
According to Andrew Keens the progression towards a more public society is apparent and inevitable, predicts the gleeful deterministic Jeff Jarvis about our hyper visible age. All titans of technology concluded that privacy to is a little more than a corpse. Facebooks president Sean Parker whose company is planning to eliminate loneliness said that privacy is not an issue and they agree in the twenty-first century information will be shared and that also individual privacy is a relic. The author see it that it has a past, but future.
Sean Parker again argued that today creepy is tomorrows necessity in which the author sees that Parker and his fellow entrepreneurs and futurists
Chapter Three: VISIBILITY IS A TRAP.
Privacy Concerns.
Individuals crave for secrecy and private life which is one of the most fundamental human rights across the democratic world.
Andrew keen expresses that social media has tamed privacy across the globe, geographical boundaries are being penetrated through facebook, twitter and other online social media platforms. This collaborates the global village of Marshall McLuhan which he describes as extreme global social coercion. However, digital vertigo stands that social coercion is social loss of private life.
Andrew strongly antagonizes Mark Zuckersberg accretion that facebook feature of automatic sharing of information makes the world a better place. This is what keen sees as only favorable to Zuckersberg profitable maximization. In the same vein Andrew stresses that social media has caused yoke of fragmentarian society with evaporated political and economic revolution becoming more divided than united. Instances such as the use of social media to stage grab screen terrorism in the Middle East. These wires are being initiated through Facebook, twitter and BBM as they are being equally used by political and economic elites to maintain status quo.
HYPERVISIBILITY
Hyper trap.
Michael Foucault tends to understand social platforms as a means of depriving the act of restriction, however bringing our info into public sphere. According to, Meglena Kuneva (2009) coming of the internet paved way for ones personal information to be a tool for public domain. This brought down or broke barrier between people living in diverse region being a gradual process. The social platform has consciously invaded into our private life that is the internet and social media were latently established in order to make our information accessible by third party. free the platform on free basic so as to sell users to advertisers being their dependable source of revenue (James Glercks). According to Marshall McLuhans concept which stated no media will be value free until it is no longer a dominant media. Advertisers are interested in accessing the people or users profile not the web page. Also Eli Pariser argues in his 2011 book the filter bubble the race to know as much as possible about you has become the central battle of the era for internet giant like Google, Apple, Facebook and so on. According to Michael Fertik, its rare for digital advertising business/media to care about privacy, because the users are the only assets it has to sell.
Rather than being Facebooks customers, we are the products. (NN Columnist Douglas Rushtoff).
Political Economy Online
Andrew Keen equally argues that advertisers are always data vigilant. In other words, they creep into online users data to evaluate their taste and what they are thinking about or intends to buy.
Andrew Keen also emphasizes on the following;
Facebooks, Google plus and Twitter, tweet buttons are watching us.
Tracking firms such as exelates media 6 degrees, 33 across and media malt. These tracking firms are all trying to find better slices of data on individuals.
Zuckersberg by implication is an online capitalist who penetrates into individual’s data and pop-up advertisements to maximize profit.
Following the previous research most of the American Elite are of the opinion that its better to be bankrupt than for a third party to have access into their personal lives. The system in one way or another became powerful tool in accessing ones profile, loss of data, and privacy within a blink of eye into the public sphere. This has brought commotion and mis-interception among people who reside in different locations and also being in touch with one another Alien World.
Chapter Four: DIGITAL VERTIGO
Three Lies and Three Corpses
In this chapter Andrew Keen explains to us how the world we live in is a spiral of lies. Everything about this entire public conversation does not contain a single word of truth. The so called world is the Social Media.
To explain his take, he used a vivid contrast of the world that existed in San Francisco in the 18th century, and the world of now. He explained by giving a contrast of the life they lived, which was full of excitement, power and freedom. Then explains how people are running away from their past into believing and existing in public (social media), which has become a high-tech mining camp teeming with vagabondage, alcoholism, sickness and murder.
Andrew keen uses San Francisco, to explain how we have traded our societal values for a life that does not exist on the social media.
Andrew keen also talks about how all we watch is fictitious, rather than the real. He used a mid 20s century Hollywood drama, in which, we the mass audience, paid professional actors playing the private lives of fictional characters. Everything in the scene from the play is fake and invented, so is the conversation. There is no truth from it, so is watching and implementing things we see on the social media.
In Hitchcocks vertigo, scottie is being set up by Elster to fall in love with a corpse. The blonde whom scottie follows around is a trap. Madeline is anything but her own image. She is fake, who unlike todays technologies of social shipping, has been designed to seduce coerce him. Contrary to Mark Zuckersberg dictum that we all have only one identity. Madeline is only playing the role of the shipping heiress.
At first, the plan works perfectly, Scottie is transformed into Jeremy Benthams voyeuristic fantasy, the eye of the ubiquitous camera, Madelines shadow, the inspector of all her moments. The ex-detective not only suffers from vertigo, nut from a compulsive voyeurism-a condition we might dub social eyes, all he can do is watch Madeline. Scottie isnt required to emote, he simply looks 3-4 hundred times.
What the Author is trying to explain by using Scottie is that he fell in love with a chimera, something that didnt and couldnt exist.
Social media is vain, foolish or incongruous fancy, or creature of the imagination, that only destroys our well- being. We dont always get second chances as Scott reminds us, they are mostly illusionary in the lottery of American life.
Color Excitement Power Freedom
In this segment Andrew keen explains to us using San Francisco of the 18th century describing the place, as a place full of color, excitement, power, freedom, but would it be equally distingenous to borrow these words as a description of mid-twentieth century San Francisco Bay Area? Was there color, excitement, power, freedom in the place where Hitchcock made his timeless picture?
Here his is explaining to us about using their economy. Back then power was held by large scale, and companies that dominates the economy. This arrangement is what social media evangelists describes as the push economy. In this type of economy, the people participating in push programs are generally treated as instruments to ensure that activities are performed as dictated. Their own individual needs and interests are purely secondary, if relevant at all. In relation to social media we the users are only executing the orders of those that invented the platform. Social media platforms such as Linkedin, Facebook, twitter are extensions of the founders, by using them we have been restricted to just the functions it was created for. You dont have the liberty to doing just anything, your participation is passive, because you cannot use it for what it was not created for.
The Arrival of The Future
This segment of the chapter talks about digital computer, i.e advancement in technology. In the previous centuries, the technology of analogue computers matured considerably, its functionability was always comprised by the prodigious amount of electricity required to power these machines and it was as a consequence of the size and heat. What solved this hitherto problem and transformed this mechanical computer from technological curiosity into central reality of the present day social life was the invention of the transistor.
Like James Watts eighteenth-century invention of the stream engine or Thomas Edisons nineteenth-century invention of the electric light bulb, its invention is one of those once in a century technological transformations sand silicon valley chronicles David Kaplan described this transistor as the structure of the future and the elemental of the digital age. Without the invention of this transistor, there would be no access to computer or internet, or digital technologies. And as such, without this transistor, the future of our social lives still wouldnt exist. In 1965, Gordon Moore coined his own law to explain the transformational power of the transistor. Moores law as it has come to be universally known, correctly predicted the number of transistors that could be placed in a computer chip would double every two years. This biannual doubling in power has not only enabled faster and faster and tinier and tinier but also, in the persuasive internet and our contemporary mania with social media. Thus, as Richard Florida argues, the deep and the enduring changes of our age and not technological but social and cultural. Therefore with the innovation of technologies like the traitorous eight, the history of Silicon Valley must also be understood in terms of social values, morals, judgments and economic ideas. In the context of what some sociologist would call its ideology. In order to get this excavation, we need to return to the earlier question about the mid twentieth century Bay Area. In spite of its technicoloured orchards, the San Francisco Bay Area with its monochromes industrial infrastructure of large electronics, defense and energy companies managed by repressive organizational men was neither a shrinking exciting nor a colorful place to fall in 1957 and 1967 the Bay Area experienced such a powerful explosion of social color and excitement that the region and indeed, the world has never been quite the same since.
The Love In
This chapter talks about San Francisco, how they had replaced their grief flannel suits with rainbow colored clothes and psychedelic scarves. How San Franciscans had like poor Scottie Ferguson fallen in love with something that didnt exist, and if youre going to San Francisco, be sure to wear flowers in your hair, by Scott McKenzie in mid- June in 1967 at the Monteri pop festival. If you come to San Francisco, Scott McKenzie promised the tens of thousands who came to Monteri summer time would be a love in there. The summer in 1967 certainly began as if everything was easter, new year and all of her birthday. Also, the summer of love presented an attempt to unite all the gentle people of the world. the people who came to the city in the summer in 1967 were seeking the loving idea of social connectivity, with the San Francisco oracle sounding like Don Tapscott described as the renaissance of compassion, awareness, and love and the revelation of unity for all mankind. According to Gitlin, between 50,000 and 75,000 people flocked to the 1967 love on Haight Ashbury to openly share their possession, minds, body, good vibrations, stimulant and past and future together.
Chapter Five: The Cult of The Social
The Macgruffin
The mechanical element about internet is technology that social media revolution could have not been possible without the advance in technology in the early seventies electrics engineers of Silicon Valley make two critical technological breakthrough.
Introduction of standard packet switching networks and first generation micro process develop by Gordon moore and Robert noyces intel corporation that enables large scale networking of digital devices Seeley Brown describe this as big shift. That big shifts empower personal computers to communicate with one another but it not marketing significant development in technology. In 1876, Alexandra Graham Bells invented telephone and that is another technological development in the history of social media. John Markoff made known that region silicon valley has transform the world, by transforming it with it revolutionary microprocessor and packet switching networks and that the world has also transfer its scientific centre for development digital technology into engine room of global social and cultural revolution.
John Pery pioneer of electronic frontier foundation who's Buhamran product of counter culture Fred Turner calls new communialist imported the sixties disruptive libertarianism, its rejection of hierarchy and authority. Its infatuation brought openness, transparency and personal authenticity and its global communitarianism into the culture of what has become known as cyber space.
The vision was to unite all human beings in a global network linked by computers. The idea is the what Timwu refers to as basic of what we now call the internet. The internet is design for social offer to help people work together and not a technical toy. According to Tim Berners lee our architect of World Wide Web, the goal of web is to improve and support our web like Its existence in the world, what Timwu calls network design.
A global network of all human beings connected by computer is a way of keeping alive disruptive spirit of the summer of love, with its challenge to traditional corporate and cultural hierarchies, the purpose of personal computing go hand in globe with the idea of computer without communication. He further explains that personal computer and the internet has the natural home of the homeless to the refuges through network technology. In the same sixties counter culture elites enter the American work force and reshape the economic life with their rebellions, individualism and their romantic communitarian.
While we were not paying attention: the industrial age just ended. The industrial revolution has been a central cause and structural shift on the economic landscape transition from an industrial economy dominated by monoliths like IBM etc. The individual economic was shaped by what Peter Druker defined as knowledge information economy. He further said he cannot tell what the further society in the next economy will look like, that we are still in the theory of transition period. Druker describe the transformation from trade based economic industrial production from economy dominated from the exchange of information describe as shift in central of gravity from manufacturer to customer.
The value in the digital information economy of social network like facebook, linkedin, google, twiter are referred to as free agent nation of self-employed and autonomous knowledge worker by Daniel Pink, says about post industrial economy, a working environment ideally suited to the behemain culture of an increasingly individualized and self providing digital elite.
Kevin Kelly, Silicon Valley presented the intent as a post for this economic order managed by the hive mind of a new digitally connected social order. John Perrybarlor communication in vision of the digital revolution as a result of opening of cyber space. Marshal Mcluhan argument from his book Gutenberg and understanding of the media (1964) about cyber space uniting mankind in a single global village has become one of Silicon Valley central believes among social network entrepreneur like Mark Zukerberg which people refers to as a company that unite close to a billion members, and also scholars realize that marshal McLuhan vision of a universal communication platform that unite the planet.
Marshal Mcluhan embrace technology and a type of person that travels back world to view things from the ancient society, colour excitement, power freedom and also hailed the new electric age, he sees value of information, technology as widing the tape backwards and also draws back into he called our tribal mesh of a pre-modern oral culture.
The technological futurism of Marshal McLuhan and disciple like Mark Zukerberg has a greater contribution to the age.
Chapter six
The Age of the Great Exhibition
The chapter covers Andrew Keens argument in trying to prove Philip Rosedale wrong of his statement while the internet remembers everything that we enter into it, this old library. Remembering everything bring us all together, it enable the unity of mankind giving a story crystal palace, the shattering of the glass and the return of the future.
The Holy Grail
This section of the chapter throws light on two union coming together to debate on whether the entrepreneurs of silicon valley, the architects shaping todays web 3.0 revolution, could be trusted with our future in a digitalized world where the boundary between first and second life were quickly dissolving. Also, he compares the merit of Benjamin Woodward nineteen-century physical building with the transparent architecture of the twenty-first century virtual network and an aspect of the great exhibition with the presence of dignitaries and designers.
Social Art
Keens goes further to explain the painting in the Gothic library where the exhibition was taking place, painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a group of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood friends to include William Morris and Edward Burne Jones, of which king Arthur's mythological court was brought back to life in seven frescoes, painted between 1851 & 1859. Even the Pre-Raphaelites relied on the most innovative modern technology to paint pictures which romanticized the past that could never exist. Though, they set out to criticize the spirit of the age and to revivify society with their Gothic art but also had a certain sort of belief in the power of technology to help them accurately represent the world and make their creative work accessible to their audience.
Also, the art work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti had lasted only 3 years because they had failed to work up their information. This issue led to the argument between Philip Rosedales praise of the internet remembering everything, bringing us together and Andrew Keens further explanation of vertigo digital.
The Unity of Mankind
Andrew Keen talks about Prince Albert's big idea to enable the unity of man by bringing everyone in the world together, which was to be done by creating something crystalline transparency. In his word nobody, however who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, in which tends rapidly to realization of the unity of mankind. He was describing the epochal shift between the old fragmented agricultural communities and the new networked industries architecture of factories.
The idea was that with its mechanical railways, streamships, mass newspaper and telegraph lines, the industrial revolution had reinvented the idea of physical distance, transforming village. What Albert called the realization of the unity of mankind Prince Albert believed that the world had reached a stage where all knowledge and innovation were recognized as being property of the international community as a whole, not something that needed to be protected by secrecy from the gaze of outsiders. He added that the festival of innovation, with its faith in openness and transparency, would bring the world together and was to be the great exhibition.
Prince Alberts attempt to unite the human race through a universal celebration of technology and science with exhibition of cornucopia of industrial design, mechanical technology and steam powered machines which were machines for solving human labours, the great exhibition was an exuberant celebration of the idea not just scientific and therefore material progress but progress in social, civic and moral affairs too. Prince Alberts grand goal to bring people together and break down social boundaries of nineteenth-century life had, in many ways been successful. The great exhibition was the first genuinely open, inclusive event of the nineteenth-century in which the English working classes and aristocracy physically mingled together with citizens of the same nation, and attracted 60 million visitors over the next thirty years.
In many ways, the great exhibition was a triumph of Prince Alberts faith in nineteenth-century industrial technology to realize the unity of mankind.
The Shattering of the Glass
In November 30, 1936, the crystal palace crumbled in flames. Paxton's building fell into despair and debt what was trusted as Prince Albert's internationalist dream. And at this period, his dream had not only died in south London, but also throughout most of the world. His faith in industrialization and the belief that technology and science would unite us had proven to be tragically misguided, the dream of history's wonderful transition turned out, in much of the world, to be closer to a nightmare. Rather than creating the unity of man, they led to an age of the nations state, a new kind of imaginary community in which we defined ourselves in unique terms that not only exclude neighboring nations but also cultural minorities within our own society and transforming society into a transparent prison that outlawed the liberty of independent throughout and killed individual privacy.
The Return of the Future
Web 2.0 and Reid Hoffman, the archangel behind today's web 3.0 revolution, debate what we had most to fear in digital world overflowing with more and more personalized data.
The shift in power from a single omniscient twentieth century Big Brother to the vast cohort of twenty-first-century little Brother is what distinguishes our future from the age of the great exhibition. What, intact, we see when we gaze into the future is that all the glass once used by Joseph Paxton to build the crystal palace has in our age of great exhibitionism, been transformed into billions of Auto-icons.
Andrew Keen gives picture of what the future he seeks looks like. The return of the apparachik as an omniscient wireless device, the society that is becoming its own electronic image disunity of little brothers, human beings turned inside out, so that all their most intimate data is displayed in the full gaze of public network. So imagine a world without either secrecy or privacy, where everything and everyone is transparent he finally concluded this chapter by saying we see digital vertigo, more and more digital vertigo.
Chapter seven: The Age of Great Exhibition
The Crystal Prison
The chapter dwells more on explaining the strategies and desgns of the networking world. Captioned as CRYSTAL PRISON looks at the possibilities of social media communities will relace the nation-state as source of personal identity.
Keene tries to relate social media as an industrial prison taking our daily activities online. In his word reverse of the principle of the dungeon, its goals were as simple as its architecture: surveillance and control. That is with our online activities we are under control of the internet. We update our daily activities online which are vulnerable.
The prisons three tiered A wing between 1848 and 1856. Cells were built one-way-spy-holes that destroy the prisoner’s privacy and enable the authority to watch at will. Nevertheless this can be argued as it is for security reasons but rather it can be deduced their privacy is being abridged.
However spy cameras are installed in the A prison, so also as to the Oxford mall that market its products to customers online. Therefore it becomes such a desirable place for criminals to break into its luxurious rooms.
In his words that oxford mall playfully market itself like myself, imagine a person that is a hotel, now imagine a person that's suddenly in luxury boutique hotel in oxford, destination brasserie and hangout and highlife hoodlums pinch yourself, you are doing time at the mall.
We Live in Public
Our social future may have arrived William Gibson ascertain in 1993, he described as the unevenly distribute. The internet as our crystal prison has taken care of our personal life, our day to day activities are uploaded online every seconds of our life. Josh Harris a hotel proprietor as well as one of the greatest pioneer founded it. His basement experiment of the Capsule hotel in New York City, where it comprised of 100 pods style rooms which was purposely designed to eliminate loneliness. As a boutique hotel it contains radical transparency that all of its actions were not kept private.
Therefore we live in public as the 2009 documentary film by Ondi Timoner, which depicted internet pioneer Josh Harris. Its central idea is the loss of privacy in the internet age. It was a Japanise capsule hotel outfitted with cameras in every pod, and screens that allow each occupant to monitor the other pods installed in the basement.
The website describes how, with quite Hariss proved how, in the not so distant future of life online, we will willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition with all deeply desire. The idea of the capsule hotel is described as modus Vivendi that is enabling real identities, blood and flesh people, to generate massive amount of ideas.
At the closure of capsule hotel by the New York police, Harris not satisfied with ruining of other peoples lives, turned the cameras on him and began to entirely broadcast uncensored 24hours version of his own life or we live in public. This self destructive experiment resulted not only in breakup of Harris relationships but also led to his own reputational and financial bankruptcy. Today Harris lives in Ethiopia in exile from his family, friends and creditors. The saddest internet we have ever heard of version of a man who tried to own our entire image but now owns nothing.
The Scobble Story
Unlike Josh Harris, Robert Scoble is neither a holy fool nor a dominated visionary a former Chief humanizing officer at Microsoft, columnist at Fast Company Magazine and Co.
Robbert Scoble an internet pioneer who is regarded as among five most influential twitters in the world tweets to his almost 200,000 followers @ scobeiler. He believed in the disappearance of private realm. Therefore as a victim of an open web he tweets and makes his friends online. He is probably a victim of we live in public and also fall within the loss of personal identity as a nation state to social media community. As the writer said in his encounter with one of Scobles neighbor, he asked the neighbor whether he knows or is in contact. The nieghbour replied no probably because he did not belongs to the neighborhood.com though popular on the internet but not known among his neighbors this is just a lost of socialization and loss of personal identity as a nation-state.
Chapter Eight: The Best Picture of 2011
In this chapter, keen explains the issue of privacy in the internet and the various legislations and bills being put in place by various governments to ensure privacy. He also talks about friendship and the concept of intimate relationships on the internet and their implications and he round up the chapter with two stories about making the right choice as regards the internet. The chapter is divided into 4 segments.
The Most Valuable Picture of 1848
Keen starts the chapter by explaining the early marriage life of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. According to him, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made sixty-three copper-plated personal etchings of their domestic life with family and friends, including their two eldest children Bertie the heir to Victoria's throne and Vicky. It was an unintended exhibition but between October 1840 and November 1847, Victoria and Albert sent these pictures to a printer to make copies of the copperplates but the printers journeyman made his own copies and sold them to London publisher William Strange who then released a printed exhibition of the work and even went as far as promising the purchasers of the catalogue a facsimile of either the Queens or Prince consorts autograph.
This incident kick started the fight for privacy in the industrial age as the dispute appeared in court as Prince Albert V. Strange, a famous case. The English law came to the defense of Victoria and Alberts right to the privacy of their own pictures.
This is just one among the many other incidents of violation of privacy mentioned by Keen in this book. According to him, these have led to the agitation of government for the control and legislation of the internet. Andrew Keen made mention of a meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and some super-nodes like himself, Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt before the G8 summit in 2011 to discuss how the government can civilize the internet and to protect the privacy of its users. According to Keen, Schmidt was against what he (Schimidt) called stupid governmental rules, arguing that technology will move faster than governments, so dont legislate before you understand the consequences. Keen was also not in full support of legislating the internet as he claimed that the most effective cure for todays destruction of privacy is not an avalanche of new legislation but not publishing anything in the first place.
Keen goes further to discuss various legislations and bills about privacy in the past and in recent times being put forth by government officials like West Virginian Senator John D. Rockefeller, Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Senator John Kerry and John McCain among others.
Keen explained that as much as legal and political action, we also need more consumer literacy about the core nature of Web 3.0 businesses.
Privacy: The Webs Hot New Commodity
Here, keen explains how trust and the need for privacy have become the hot new commodity of the web. According to Facebooks chief technology officer Bret Taylor, Trust is the foundation of the Social web, he went further to state that people will stop using Facebook if they don't trust in our services.
According to Keen, the market is simply a reflection of our collective desires and actions and that it is to be hoped that we, as the market, will reject many of the more absurd or destructive social networks now being funded in today's social gold rush. He went further to give examples of social start-ups like Blippy and Social Eyes that were rejected by the market as a result of their radical and absurd functions. He then explained that the market may also be pushing the social networking companies to focus more on making privacy central to their services.
Keen went further to explain the memory of the internet by representing it with two analogies made by memory expert Joshua Foer. According to The New York Times Paul Sullivan and Nick Bitton, the internet is like an elephant that never forgets- making it analogous to S- the early twentieth century Russian journalist described by Joshua Foer in Moonwalking with Einstein, as a man that quite literally, remembered everything, and EP an eighty year old brain damaged lab technician whom Joshua Foer describes as the most forgetful man in the world. Even though Keen disagrees with the fact that the internet never forgets, he asks that the internet have a balance or a compromise between perfect memory of S and the nonexistent one of EP if the internet is to be our home in the future, instead of totally erasing your virtual life or making the internet forget like in the option of Web 2.0 suicide machine that can totally erase your virtual life.
A pipe of crystal meth
In this segment, keen explains how the social media in the hands of people is like a pipe of crystal meth. He gave an example of how New York Times Bill Keller's 13 year old daughter had joined Facebook and had accumulated 171 friends within a few hours. According to the executive editor of the New York Times, friendship has become a kind of drug on the internet, the crack cocaine of our age.
Keen further explains that according to Professor Robin Dunber, an anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist and authority on the behaviour of primates, as well as the director of Oxford University's Institute of cognitive and evolutionary anthology, we can only remember 150 individuals or keep track of all the relationships involved in a community of 150
According to Dunber, there is a limit to the number of people we can hold a particular level of intimacy. Keen therefore asks how we can teach this social complexity to Bill Keller's daughter.
The Best Picture Of 2011
In this segment, keen describes 2011 using two pictures, the first picture talks about the semi factual story about Mark Zuckerberg's controversial founding of a Facebook, produced by David Fincher and written Aaron Sorkin, titled The Social Network based on Ben Mezrich's controversial anecdotal 2009 book titled Accidental Billionaires. In the story, semi fictionalized Zuckerberg, is portrayed as a friendless computer programmer incapable of real social relationships who betrayed what it is to be human.
The second picture of 2011 is the story of Tom Hooper's The Kings Speech. The story originated from the story of Bertie, the eldest son and hair to Albert and Victoria who died in 1901 and his son George V became king, he had two sons, Edward and Albert (whose loved ones also called him Bertie). When George V died, Edward became King but abdicated the throne after a year and the responsibility was shifted to Bertie. The Kings Speech is the true story of an unlikely yet intimate friendship between the aristocratic Bertie and Lionel Logue, his Australian voice .
Conclusion: The Woman In Blue
-TRACY CHEVALIER, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
Exorcising Bentham
The conclusion of the book began with the author who after the giddy experience he had in front of the Auto-Icon needed a drink so as to further his journey to Amsterdam where he was to speak at a social media conference decided to stay for a while till his time for departure was ready. While he was still there taking a drink he decided to pounder more on the Bentham corpse he saw.
Andrew Keen, who according to him, kept on pounding on what he saw that is the publication which was boldly written JEREMY BENTHAM that began with a description of his illustrious corpse on public show over the road in the university college and ended in praise of his utilitarian philosophy.
His Auto-Icon as he called it, it is in fact his skeleton, dressed in his own clothes and topped with a wax model of his head. His actual head is mummified and kept in his college vault. It is brought out for meeting of the college council and he is recorded as being present but not voting. Above the bar can be seen a copy of the head, made by the students of the college.
At this point after starring at the publication his heart sank. But he knew he had to continue moving. He immediately realized that history was repeating itself;
In words of Andrew Keen he said History was repeating itself, I realized. The simple architecture of Benthams Auto-Icon reflected so to speak the digital narcissism of our social media. I recognize too that Benthams Utilitarian Ideals particularly his greatest happiness of the greatest number of principles, were little different from the ideals of contemporarily digital visionaries like Mark Zuckerberg whose social network, you are developing a gross happiness index to quantify global sentiments. . . . . . . . .
Here, in this Exorcising Bentham, the author, tries to bring out the kinds of ills social media has caused and then relating to the Auto-Icon Benthams Utilitarian Ideas particularly his greatest happiness of the greatest number principle, were how social media has created happiness by just a world of Like Button creating a global sentiment.
On Digital Liberty
Here, the Author looked at a man who had been born not far from Jeremy Bentham- On Rodney Terrace Penton Ville, no more than a mile or two east of Bloom bury. That man was John Stuart Mill, the most influential British social and political thinker of the Nineteenth Century.
Mill, according to Andrew Keen rejected Benthams interpretation of human beings as simply calculating machines. Instead, Mill saw our identities as being much more complex and unique, along the lines of the noble characters in The King's Speech, defined as much by our love and generosity of the spirit, by our poetry and by our originality and independence of thought, as by maximization of our pleasures and minimization of our pain.
However, what most distinguishes Mills thoughts and makes him Britain most important nineteenth century social and political thinker lies in his understanding of how this new connected world impacted the autonomy of the individual. Unlike Benthams Utilitarian ideas that were preoccupied with rights of all individuals.
Mill, who laid out his critique of mass society in his 1857 classic On Liberty said what he feared most in this connected and industrial was the creative mediocrity of popular taste, habits and opinions. 'Men are not Sheep', he wrote, arguing that modern government has responsibility to protect not so much man from himself but individuals from the tyranny of public opinion. We should be to do what we like, he thus famous insisted, as long as actions didnt harm anyone else. If Benthams faith lay in individuals avoiding being corrupted by the conformity of newly connected networked masses and remaining true to themselves. To Mill, therefore, individual autonomy, privacy and self-development were all essentials both to human progress and to the development of good life.
Then, the author Andrew Keen looked and pounder on the Mills understanding and what struck him was how acutely relevant On Liberty is today, in an age being revolutionized by a pervasive connective technology.
He added todays social media has made a world in which many of us have forgotten what it means to be human. Adding to his own critic of our increasing transparent and social age he looked at some scholars who also are mourning the loss of the private person, the disappearance of secrecy and mystery, primacy of likes over love most of all, the collective amnesia about what it really means to be human. Its a super-sad true love story in which we are forgetting who we really are said Zadie Smith, as well as Frazen, Shreyngart and all the other critics.
Social Pictures
Zukerbergs facebook has exposed our privacy with the supply of our daily picture posts on social media platforms.
The Woman in Blue
The conclusive part which the author Andrew Keen decided to tag it The Woman in Blue was later addressed and scrutinized in this section. After he had his time on the portrait-self-portrait was still in his mind and after he had finished his speech on social media in Amsterdam, he found himself at the Rijksmuseum, the museum that house some of the most illustrious Dutch pictures from the seventeenth century.
At Rijks museum, as he stood he saw two self-portraits by Rembrandt: One as hubristic red-haired youngster when the artist was no older than Mark Zuckerberg; the other as a weary old man distinguished by what the historian Simon Schema called Rembrandt Eyes, When the artist, where fortunes by then had dramatically declined, painted himself as a wizard Apostle Paul. He said in spite of their deep nature both pictures, are universal statements.
Furthermore, theses pictures are there for almost four hundred years ago from that year he stood. But nevertheless, he stood the gazing with wonder at these pictures as his was to borrow some words from Christine Rosen, both a bid for immortality and a paint anthropology of seventeenth-century Dutch individualistic culture. And then he saw her, as the author said. the woman who is anything but her own image. I saw a picture of who we really are.
The her was the Woman in Blue. Reading a letter, a picture painted by Johannes Vermeer Between 1663 and 1664. The Woman in Blue reading a letter is a picture of a young Dutch woman, probably pregnant, raptly reading and unfolded letter that map on the rear world behind her, an open box in front of her and an empty chair in the foreground. These are all universal symbols of loss, opportunity and travel- Vermeers clues, his timelines, to making sense of the picture. The room is well lit, but we see no window, no source for what appear to be natural light. The young woman is so locked, so imprisoned in her own world, gripping the letter between her hands, that she is unaware of anyone else watching her.
Standing there watching her as Keen puts it, it mesmerized him, her concentration, the letter he saw; Watching the Woman in Blue, is an act of the purest voyeurism. But the longer he stood the secretive she becomes, the more private the picture became, the more the relevant, the more pressing, the more eternal and the more mysterious the letter in her hands appeared.
And this was exactly what The Woman in Blue had remained. We know nothing about her except that she has taken care to remain herself, an entirely private being, hyper visible, a mystery to the world- the person Zadie Smith fears we have lost. She may or may not be John Stuart Mills Unique individual, but she does represent the condition for Mills definition of good life, somebody left to their own devices, autonomous, not a little lonely above all, private. Her authenticity lies in her mystery, not her nakedness. Woman in Blue is an image of herself without knowing.
As he continued staring, he realized that this timeless picture is indeed what we are risking losing. In the great exhibitionism of our hyper visible Web 3.0 world, we are always on public display, forever revealing ourselves to the camera, we are losing the ability to remain ourselves. We are forgetting who we really are.
Remaining Ourselves
This is the last section of the conclusive part of this book. Here, the author stated that this book with which he began started with a lively corpse from the past, so he said that he will be ending it with haunting corpse from the future. As an Oxford undergraduate, youll remember, old Jeremy Bentham was scared of ghosts. But unlike Bentham, Keen wasnt scared of either ghost or goblins. But what he feared the most was the ghost of mankind, a ghost that would have forgotten what it is to be human. This ghost would be living hyper visibly with incalculable followers, associates and friends on every social network, past and future. The existence of this ghost, I confess, would make me scared to sleep alone at night too and would require my assistance to sleep closely beside me.
CRITICISM
Andrew Keen in this book focuses on the executable and world of hyperconnectivity of the Web 3.0 and its technicalities. Just like in his other books like Cult of the Amateur and The Internet is not the answer, in Digital Vertigo, Keens talks a lot about the weaknesses and short comings of the Internet.
According to Po Bronson in his review of The Internet is not the answer, "Andrew Keen has written a very powerful and daring manifesto questioning whether the internet lives up to its own espoused values. He is not the opponent of the internet culture; he is its conscience, and must be heard. "This is very much true. Andrew Keen has brought to light so much about the Internet, opening our eyes to a lot of loopholes and giving us a choice. Keen explains how the Web 3.0 has given organizations like Google, Apple and Facebook the opportunity to become multi dollar for profit companies. He mentions that according to Reputations.com CEO Michael Fertik, the business models of supposedly free social networks like Facebook is the sale of our information to their advertisers. Hence, "free services on the internet are never really free" (pg. 167-168).
Keen was also very right in his saying that we tend to post everything and in the process loose our true selves and make ourselves naked on the Internet. He explains how we have lost what it means to have real social interactions and connections. According to him, the June 2011 Pew report shows that, the typical Facebook user has 229 friends and has more close relationships than the average American. And most people have never actually met an average of 7% of their 229 friends (pg. 173). But according to Robin Dunbar an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, there's a limit to the number of people we hold a particular level of intimacy, he further explains that we can only remember 150 individuals (pg. 175). This begs the question, how many real friends do we have?
Andrew Keen goes deep in his book to portray the life of the 21st century and where it is heading to. He shows how the Internet that is supposed to bring us together is dividing, diminishing and disorienting us continuously plunging us into a swirling state of digital vertigo.
Even though Keen has brought a lot of things to light, raising a lot of debates and bringing to bare things that should be a cause for concern and like Po Bronson said being 'the Internet's conscience,' one can not help but see him as a biased conscience. Keen goes on and on about the issues and short comings of the Internet but fails to acknowledge many of the important developments and progress that it has also brought. The same Internet he condemns is the Same Internet he sells his books to people. And as much as there is sense in his school of thought, he makes it appear so controversial and his choice of words is almost personal. He quite literally doesn't hold back any punches.
Andrew Keen further stresses that the internet further divides its users. By so doing, he cites the havoc initiated on the social media platforms by Alkaeda terrorists and Islamic State (IS) of middle Eastern world which he describes as a means through which deadly radicalism of political and economic changes are established but the same social media is a means to global social cohesion as described by Marshal McLuhan in his global village concept. To this use, marriages have been actualized through social media, intercultural diffusion that leads to that leads to peaceful coexistence as a result of understanding one another and individual differences through social media.
Equally, students, academicians, teachers and scholars have utilised the internet for researches and improved academic activities. Learning and teachings also take place among students and between teachers and students internationally. There are varieties of internet libraries across globe one from which Andrew Keens books are published and sold.
He also opines that, the right owners of social media, the likes of Zukerberg, have egocentric idea of profit maximization as capitalists. Notwithstanding, the internet has made global transaction of goods possible by enabling positive advantage to the users with rational taste for foreign goods. This, in all ramifications, stands to satisfy the users’ choice of varieties across the world by purchasing the goods that suit their urge across the sea. This is global enterprise made easy by the internet.
This might be considered missing the point that Andrew Keen is trying to make but, so what there are privacy concerns on the Internet? So what the corporate organizations are making us the products? It won't stop people from using the Internet and as much as he thinks the Internet is bad, it is not going away anytime soon. So what is the way forward?
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