DEPARTMENT OF MASS COMMUNICATION
FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA
Course:
Online journalism (Mcom 414)
Assignment
BY GROUP Seven (7)
Question:
Give a detailed review of Andrew Keen’s “The internet is not the answer”.
LECTURER –IN-CHARGE
Muhammad Hashim Suleiman
July, 2017
List of Group Members
- TANKO, Sylvia Patrick -U14MM2033
- ADEBAYO, Adejoke Janet -U14MM2009
- RONBAK, Maksum Judith - U14MM2016
- BELLO, Kamila - U14MM2043
- NURAINI, Bilkisu Abdulrahman -U14MM2047
- BELLO, Ramat - U14MM2012
- AMINU, Fauziya - U14MM2045
- LAWRENCE, Helen - U13MM1161
- FATUMA, Adamu -U13MM1141
- OLAYANJU, Bilal Oluwatobiloba - 13MM1175
- ABDU Samaila Thomas - U13MM1198
- AT-TIAMIYU, Mustapha Olaniyi - U14MM2052
- SALAWUDEEN, Maryam - U14MM2024
- TAHIR, Aminu Musa - U13MM1171
- DARIYA, Yakubu - U11MM1154
- PATRIC A. Omoake - U13MM1173
- ALI, Ibrahim - U14MM2020
- BENARD, Enenche James - U13MM1047
- AMODU, Margaret Ojonoka - U13MM1051
- ESTHER, Ibukun Salako - U13MM1035
- OKWO, Eze David - U10MM1081
- ESTHER, Nneka Oyenma - U13MM1077
- MOHAMMED, Habib Abagana - U13MM1180
- MOHAMMED, Ishaka - U13MM1056
Introduction
The book, The Internet is not the Answer, was written by Andrew Keen. Born in 1960, Keen is a British-American writer whose write-ups have been centered on the disruptive nature of the internet. Due to this, many have referred to him as a controversial commentator of the digital revolution. Keen has authored three different books that revolve around the same theme. The earlier ones are: Cult of the Amateur and Digital Vertigo and his current international hit, The Internet is not the Answer, which is the London Sunday Times acclaimed as a “powerful, frightening, read” and the Washington post “an enormously useful primer for those of us concerned that online life isn’t as shiny as our digital avatars would like us to believe”.
Keen introduces the book with the title “The building is the message”, referring to a club in San Francisco known as Battery which, according to the founders, Michael and Xochi Birch, would create an avenue for the eradication of inequality between the haves and the have nots. However, the establishment turned out to be creating a higher degree of disproportion than the one they promised to eradicate. Keen then likens the case of the club to that of digital revolution pioneered by the internet. He argues that the club is untruth, offering deeply gaping inequality and injustice as they promised to democratize media and empower those historically without a voice, but have now invariably created new ways of making profit for a few, tiny group, ignoring its main essence. This work therefore is an attempt to render a detailed review of the book The Internet is not the Answer.
Chapter one: The Network
The first chapter tries to affirm the concept of global village as coined by Marshall McLuhan. Keen looks at this from historical perspective, starting with the world’s largest provider of mobile networks, Ericsson, which was founded in 1876 by a Swedish engineer named Lars Magnus Ericsson. According to Keen, Ericsson mobile, as of 2013, had global revenue of 35Billion dollars from 180 countries. This is largely as a result of massive purchase globally. Ericsson provides mobile networks to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Telecoms like AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Telefonica (p. 16). Of course, with the internet being the network of networks connects almost all the users of Ericsson and other providers of mobile networks thereby making communication non-linear by ensuring there is neither an organizing principle nor hierarchy. This, of course, is what Keen says in the introduction as the promise made by the digital revolution. Still on the promise, this chapter outlines the predictions made by some personages and corporate bodies concerning the improvement that is likely to arise in the global mobile and the internet industries, both technology- and economy-wise which, according to them, would be beneficial to human community. They arrived at the forecast on the basis of historical evidences.
Keen goes further in this chapter to provide the historical development of the internet, recognising the efforts of those he calls the forebears – the pioneers of the internet. According to him, there are many, but three names are at the frontline, and they are: Vannever Bush, Norbert Wiener and J. C. R. Licklider. Both Bush and Wiener worked together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1930s through 1940s, with Bush, however, being the boss. Licklider came to MIT in 1950 and was heavily influenced by the works of his predecessors, especially Wiener’s works on cybernetics.
The internet, as discussed by Keen, was developed initially as a tool of defence during the World War II. At first, it was as a result of the threatening attacks on the United Kingdom and later it was those of the Soviet Union on the United States. So, the governments of the Western bloc had to adjust their budget to invest more capitals in technology and the idea really yielded results as their trained scientists were heavily motivated towards creativity. Notwithstanding, Bush forecast that after the war, the internet would be improved upon for societal advancement. In spite of all the contributions made by the pioneers, Keen sees Paul Baran, a consultant at RAND (Research and Development) who dropped out of UCLA’s doctoral programme in electrical engineering, as the father of the internet.
The chapter concludes by recognizing the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berrners-Lee who designed the web’s architecture which comprises of three elements: HTML( Hypertext Markup Language), HTTP ( Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and URL (Universal Resource Locator).
Chapter two: the money
The one percent economy introduces us to the truth that the internet companies exist for the sole purpose of profit maximization. Perkins, a former Hewlett -Packard executive who also co-founded KPCB made the same argument about the value of the one percent in his 2007 autobiography, we boasted that KPCB investments have created, $300 billion in market value, an annual revenue stream of $100 billion, and more than 250,00 jobs. He wrote in valley boy, that it is a win-win, insisting that the new digital economy is a cooperative venture. It is resulting in more jobs, more revenue, more wealth, and more general prosperity.
This assertion that the internet companies are there for maximizing profit could be seen as the self-styled valley boy built a yatch worth $130 million dollar; they also financed the purchase of many assets worth millions of dollars.
But Perkins was wrong about the broader benefits of the network economy that KPCB played such an important role in creating. It’s becoming clear that the internet economy is anything but a cooperative venture a top-down system that is concentrating wealth instead of spreading it.
This story can be summarized in single word "money". The internet, to borrow one of Silicon Valley’s most hackneyed vulgarisms, has become ''Monetized”. It’s a curious historical coincidence.
This subtopic "monetization" sums up the fact that the internet has been used and still used for profit maximization. John Doerr, a general partner at KPCB who was originally hired by Tom Perkins, summarized this second act in a single sentence." The largest creation of legal wealth in the history of the planet". In this phrase Doerr captures how an electronic network, thanks to Doer's establishments as a KPCB partner in internet companies like Netscape, Amazon,Google, Twitter and Facebook, has made him among the richest people on earth, with a personal fortune of some $3 billion and an annual income of close to $100 million.
The central idea here is that the internet service providers are using the internet to amass wealth from the public. In the fall of1994, Clark secured a $5 million investment from John Doerr which was not only KPCB's first investment in an internet company but also among the first significant ventures of any kind in a web venture. Released in December 1994, Netscape Navigator 1.0 distributed more than 3.Million copies in three months, mostly for free. By May 1995, Netscape had 5 Million users and its market share had risen to 60% of the web browser market. Unlike many dot com companies, Netscape even had real revenue some $7 million in its first year, mostly from licensing deals to corporations.
Jeff Bezos was a Wall Street analyst who moved out west amassed a $30 billion personal fortune through his internet ventures. And his own 1994 startup, Amazon, the winner take-all store that had revenue of $74.45 billion in 2013- in spite of its convenience, great prices, and reliability reflects much of what has gone wrong with the internet in its monetized second act.
The winner takes it all network explains the fact that any network that is able to attract the largest number of users, which means that it will amass the largest share of wealth. So, the real force of nature in this digital age is a winner takes it all economy that is creating increasingly monopolistic companies like Amazon and multi-billionaire class of the wealthy like Bezos himself.
Talking about the cracked code, Google is being presented as a supreme search engine, far ahead of webpages such as Amazon,Netscape,Yahoo and eBay. Google has grown and expanded greatly; having almost all of the world's digital information.
With Google, Page and Brin have been able to put every other webpage to a standstill, and also turning the world into a big equation. By so doing, they have been able to generate a whole lot of revenue for themselves from users and investors.
More than just cracking the codes on internet profits, Google has also discovered the holy grail of the information economy. It is ahead of all other search engines in terms of information dissemination and wealth accumulation; its profits are incredible and astonishing.
Google is empowered and strengthened every time we use it. It’s a symbiosis of human and computer intelligence, the Google search engine becomes knowledgeable and useful whenever we use it. So, anytime we make a Google search, we are in a sense working towards improving it. Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.
The aspect of data factories explains how Google and other browsers have become big data companies, able to target their users' behavior and taste through the collection of their data exhaust. While we spend so much time on these networks, the entrepreneurs become super rich. So, we all are working for Facebook and Google for free; manufacturing the very personal data that makes their companies so valuable.
The internet has triggered area of the greatest accumulations of wealth, and Google in particular is by far the largest and most powerful advertising company in history.
The internet serves a platform for individuals to canvass and relate with each other socially, especially Facebook, a dominant social network created by Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook serves as the greatest generator of conversation in history, a social computer network whose 1.3 billion users were by the summer of 2014 posting 2,460,000 comments to one another every minute of every day.
Social network serves as a place on the internet where user nurtures their social relationships. Their idea was first introduced by Reid Hoffman, cofounder of a social network by the name LinkedIn.
In summary, this chapter explains how the internet has been transformed into a product with economic value that is, it has been commoditized. Few persons own and control it at the detriment of others; exploiting others while their pockets are enriched.Center
Chapter Three: The Broken Center
The third chapter focuses on the negative impact of the digital age. It discusses serious threats posed by the new communication technologies to economic development in human community. According to Keen, the advent of these modern technologies driven by the internet leads to some existing companies or corporations going bankrupt. The results of such, among other things, would be increase in unemployment, leading to reduction in economic viability and increase in poverty level and crime. All these happen as a result of artificial intelligence which favours few highly skilled workers and eliminates the moderately skilled middle class workers (p. 64). This elimination is what brings about the title of the chapter -- the broken center -- which means the replacement of the middle class workers by machines. It is a war between humans and machines, but the latter are winning as there are now intelligence labour-saving technologies, such as self-driving cars and killer robots (p. 56). In short, even delivery drones are being developed.
To buttress more on this negative impact of the internet, Keen uses a once-upon-a-time global photography giant, Eastman Kodak Corporation, as a case study. The corporation which started operations in 1888 and became very popular worldwide and successful in terms of photography, Kodak, existed for over a century and had employed over 140,000 workers before it started facing challenges in the 1990s. Kodak started cutting jobs so as to survive the challenges. The company had to cut 47, 000 jobs between 2003 and 2012.. So, Keen accuses the internet of being the cause of the problems because the concrete technologies such as mobile phones and iPads could do little harm unless with the influence of the internet which gives people sharing option through various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. So, the obsession people use to have with keeping moments by taking pictures and having them printed has been replaced as they are now obsessed with sharing pictures on the internet. This, of course, validates technological determinism theory as argued by Marshall McLuhan in 1962. To McLuhan, man's actions, feelings and thoughts are shaped by evolving technologies; and internet has led other technologies towards this actualisation at the detriment of societal economic development. In short, the company that had over 140,000 workers earlier, ended up liquidating in 2013 with just 8,500 workers.
Nevertheless, aside other negative consequences of the internet, Keen failed to consider that not only Internet, but every new technology is likely to threaten the survival of the existing one(s). The introduction of handheld camera by the founder of Kodak, George Eastman, in 1888 (p. 53) affected the existing technologies as well. Bellis (2017) narrates that the three immediate photography technologies before Eastman Kodak's handheld camera and roll film were dry plate negatives, wet plate negatives and Tintypes. Can't we say as well that Kodak destroyed the jobs of the people working with the aforementioned technologies? After all, despite the fact that everything has advantages and downsides, the positive impact of the internet outweighs the negative. With the internet, access to educational and other useful materials has been made easy. Time and distance as barriers to communication have been eradicated.
To wrap it up, the chapter basically discusses the side effects of internet with much emphasis on unemployment that arises as a result of artificial intelligence.
.
Chapter four: The personal Revolution
Under the sub topic in Chapter 4 titled “Hello This Is Us”, Andrew Keen has a fair perception on the usage of social networking platforms especially on Instagram saying “Social networks like Instagram can’t, of course, be entirely blamed for this epidemic of narcissism and voyeurism now afflicting our culture” sitting scholars that contributes to his notion of “selfie centric” scholars like Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell, and Elias Aboujaoude, that explains the indication of “user” contemporary obsession with public self-expression which has complex cultural, technological, and psychological origins that can’t be exclusively traced to the digital revolution. Instagram enables us to take photos that are dishonest advertisements for ourselves, so search engines like Google provide us with links to sites tailored to confirm our own mostly ill-informed views about the world, haven’t said that,
Andrew with the excruciating fact about the usage of Instagram Nor other social networking sites crossing this narcissism line (like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, Snapchat among others) which constitute to the so called “expressive individualism” of our networked age,
As David Brooks (a conservative American author as well as political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.) will have it, “our current fashion for vulgar immodesty represents another fundamental break with the Great Society, which, in contrast with today, was represented by a culture of understatement, abnegation, and modesty. “When you look from today back to 1945 you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line”, which is confirmed by a 2013 study by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology showing that the vast majority of Internet and cell phone communication takes place inside a hundred-mile radius of our homes and by a 2014 Pew Research and Rutgers University report revealing that social media actually stifles debate between people of different opinions. But With more than a quarter of all smartphone use taking place on Facebook and Instagram, most Web communication these days actually takes place inside that intimate hundred-millimeter radius between our faces and our mobile devices is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, ‘Hello this is me ‘our selfie-centered delusions. Indeed, in an economy driven by innovator’s disasters, “The real myth is that we are communicating at all. The truth, of course, is
That we are mostly just talking to ourselves on these supposedly” that we can find the most disturbing implications of the shift from the Kodak to the Instagram moment and criticizing the self-portrait emergence he gave example with
“Pope Francis publishing what the Guardian called a “badass selfie” inside St. Peter’s Basilica.
The inevitable “Auschwitz selfies,” to the “Bridge girl,” the young woman who casually snapped a selfie in front of somebody committing suicide off New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.
Keen lamented about Instagram by saying “And I, for one, don’t like what I’m seeing that the Internet promised by entrepreneurs like Kevin Systrom (co-founder of instagram) and relentlessly cheerful futurists like Steven Johnson which was supposedly going to “capture the world’s moments” and create a global village, thereby making us all more open-minded, progressive, and intelligent is not the one we are seeing today “history is retweeting itself” But the personal revolution is certainly making us more parochial and unworldly. In the end note of this sub chapter he sited Eli Pariser, the former president of MoveOn.org, describing the echo-chamber effect of personalized algorithms as “The Filter Bubble.” The Internet might be a village, Pariser says, but there’s nothing global about it.
In the chapter called “the personal revolution”, keen described that the social networking sites such as; instagram, Facebook, twitter, amazon and Google makes us believe that the universe revolves around us. Keen also explains that what the social networks promise us is to get in touch with others but the truth is what they are really concerned with is “Advertisement of myself”.
Keen expressed his view that the personal revolution of the internet is all about money and wealth rather than being liberating. The internet is destroying our old industrial economy, transforming what was once a relatively egalitarian system into a winner-take-all economy. Keen made a very good point by in this chapter by giving detailed explanation of how the revolution of social network has ruined a lot of business all around the world. A good example is” Kodak and instagram”, Kodak is an American technology company that produces imaging products with its historic basis on photography. Kodak was worth abouth $31 billion a quarter century ago with over 145,000 workers, while instagram really did have just 13 full time employees when Facebook paid $1 billion dollar for the startup. The advent of instagram which allowed millions of people share photos with its amazing filters has made Kodak close 13 factories, 130 photo labs and laying off about 47,000 workers. Keens point in this chapter is that instagram with a startup of just 13 people is affecting a big company with more than 145,000 working rendering about 50,000 jobless and causing the company to loose its customers. Keen is making a fair point because instagram is a free photo app, easy to use for sharing photos and it is a good app for everyone, but let’s take a look at Kodak and other professional photographers that it has rendered jobless, is it really great for them too? Keen doesn’t agree it is.
Social network sites like instagram, facebook, google, yahoo and twitter make us believe that we own the technology, but the problem is we don’t own the technology and its profits. We work for free for these data factories and by posting our photos and personal things about ourselves, we are helping these social network sites use us as revenue for their business by giving us adverts based on our profile that shows the type of things we like, our walls are being used to advertise products that is being seen by millions of people who access these sites. We are not only the unpaid product in this economy, but we are becoming the bill boards for displaying Google, Facebook, Instagram etc. adverts.
Keen’s point in this chapter is that the problem with the data factory economy is that, we the social network users have become the show that is being played in somebody else’s theater and unlike professional actors, we aren’t being paid for our labour.
In conclusion, this Chapter, Andrew keen laid emphasis on different ways the internet most especially the social media has been able to subdue the real human features that is use us, make us lonely and most especially make us change our subconscious minds towards the reality of life and as a fact of fact painting the social media black and most especially pinpointing the negativity of the internet. In other words our curiosity of the review still remains that with the insights of different problems of the internet he didn’t proffer solutions to us.
Chapter five: The Catastrophe of abundance
In this chapter, Andrew Keen starts by giving a little about his background. He grew up in England and in London to be specific, at Soho not only the historical center of the city fashion business, but the heart of movie and music industries. Soho was a town full of entertainment activities most especially songs of Elton John, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrox and so on were played very often at the club. His family owned a store called falbers fabrics, the same area where his grandfather Victor falber, an immigrant entrepreneur from polish, who was a silk wooden market trader owned a shop in early twentieth century, were most servants patronize.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 same year Berwick street became famous and was known as “Golden mile of vinji”, was known as a record storm of funk, jazz and classical music. That year was also the year or golden age of media, because of the independent Newspaper shop in Britain, and also because the center of independent musical life in London. That year, soho did not only become a town of buying and selling music, but also to make new friends and young talents of same peer or age group. In the mid eighties, the family fashion business started becoming bankrupt because of the rapid change in technology of fashion. The change affected his father that lead him being a cabdriver before he later got a clerical job at a family friends company.
Andrew keen got a job as an advertising sales man at a publication founded and published by Larry key known as ”The magazine of music and sound”. At the time he was living at san Francisco and that was in 1996 when he also began his internet career that same year. Larry kay was an old fashion man in his dress sense but knew how to operate a computer and his secretary types up his email whenever he wants to communicate with his writers in FI.Business 2.0 is a piece that presents the internet as a magical place and a promised land in which the old economic rules of buying, salling and trading no longer applied. Business 2.0 was a Newspaper article that appeared in the mid nineties and was given to Andrew keen by his boss Larry kay.
This article presents economics as if it were soft ware, it makes business to look like an online application and could this be understood as a circle of perpetual upgrades, new versions and fresh releases. Larry kay later put him in charge of establishing a web strategy for Fi and they worked hand in hand to see if they could make money out of it. He confessed that is not hard to be an internet expert especially theoretically. Amazon at that time was the only outline shop in existence, people place there order and get whatever they purchase at the Amazon. Shortly, he left F.I and started his own internet company named Audio café. He still did the job of an online advertising salesman and the CEO of an internet startup. It was a very big challenge because to sell online was not as easy as print because he has more experience in print advertising and not online advertising.
In 2011, it was noted by the U.S chamber of commerce that online piracy was becoming an epidemic. An analysis made by NetNames in January 2011 reveals that 432million unique web actively searched for content that infringes copyright. A report in 2010 estimated that 25% of all Europe an visits pirates site every month. And also, British web user regularly accessed illegally streamed or downloaded content. Digital sales also made a decline of 6% in 2013. Online piracy is very high at this time, and according to a 2011 report by the London-based international federation of the phonographic industry, 1.2million European jobs would be destroyed...is now seen as a harmless fun. Today, it is seen as a big business of peer-to-peer and Bit Torrant portals that profits most especially in advertising revenue. Today, it is seen that many multibillion dollar internet companies are part of the piracy crew. e.g Facebook, twitter, instagram e.t.c . allows the spread of unlicensed content and also allows illegal activities. In fact, prior to these social networks, it was clear that piracy began with Google because as of that time, it was the only search engine and advertising company too. Google the dominant search engine has really invested in YouTube and it became the world’s dominant user generated video platform but at the same time, it is not the answer most especially not for independent musical artists Arctic Monkeys, Adele and also Jack white, and in June 2014 they were threatened to be thrown off YouTube unless they are signed up to the web sites subscription music service.
Chapter six: The one percent economy
An abundance of stupiditystupidity
Keen starts this chapter by alluding to how the internet is having a disastrous impact on our culture which he formed an opinion on since 2005 when invited to a weekend event called FOO camp (Friends of OReily Camp) who descried themselves as “Unconference conference”. This meant that the camp was an entirely unstructured event whose monotonously repetitive agenda was set by self-aggrandizing participants who are advocates of diversity of opinions.
He points out that FOO camp capitalized on the word “Media” and “democracy” or “democratization of the media” as key phrase to sell home their agenda. The question “what can help us create a better world in the digital age? Was asked with which they all agreed that the internet was the answer, giving a voice to everyone thereby making it more diverse. This was done by “disintermediating” traditional media and making the information stream open and facilitated by the gatekeepers (the bourgeoisies).Keen equally criticized how the powerful, wealthy, entrepreneurs of Web 2.0 transformed the web into a profitable venture for their own interest as against the interest of the people. He points out that the democratization of the media has benefited just a small minority of technology insiders, criticizing multi-billion dollar monopolists like YouTube to have replaced twentieth century music, video and publishing economy.
Keen however failed to see the positive aspect of democratizing the media of the web which has ultimately brought about interactivity, collaboration, sharing of content, coproduction of content and breaking the monotonous nature of web 1.0. More so, he couldn’t have been able to write this book without the aid of the internet. He focused on the profit aspect which he argues is compounding inequality between the wealthy owners of the web and everyone else.
The one percent rule
Keen criticized the web 2.0 which was supposed to democratize media and empower those historically without a voice has now invariably created new ways of making profit for a few tiny groups ignoring its main essence. The internet according to keen threatens the world of recorded music tail as it is getting thinner and thinner over time. This has been called in part by the increasing monopoly of online music retail stores like I Tunes and Amazon and that consumers are partly subjected to tyranny of an overabundance of choice.
Keen equally notes that the most serious casualty of the digital revolution is diversity. He argues that the internet’s pervasiveness is also affecting e learning industry too where superstar teachers with instant access to audiences of millions of students are establishing a two-tiered economy in one of the historically most egalitarian of professions. In other words, classes have turned commodities through Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Keen shares similar views with the educationalist, William Deresiewicz that MOOCs are not about democratizing education but that the truth is exactly the reverse which is about reinforcing existing hierarchies and monetizing institutional prestige. He further argues that MOOCs are widening the educational divide rather than levelling the playing ground.
This point of view is rather vague because Keen failed to realize that online courses have made it easier to get education at your convenience anytime. Moreover, the internet revolution is increasing the level of education rather than destroying it. Keen also in this chapter repeatedly referred to the internet as destroying old media. This argument is against the theory of mediamorphosis which says that old media give birth to new media without the old dying off.
The people formerly known as audience
Keen starts by saying “the people formerly known as the audience are angry. Very angry”. The emotion that spreads quickly on social media is anger, with joy coming in a very distant second. This according to one academic psychology professor, Ryan Martar from the university of Wisconsin is that we are more prone to share our rage with strangers than our happiness. They want to hear others share it.
Keen affirms that just as business of online content is returning to pre-modern patronage system, its culture is going backward too. The internet to Keen has brought about an avenue for lynching, racist abuse, anti-Semitism, homophobic abuse, hate etc. The internet to him has apart from the fallacy of giving voice to the voiceless added economic inequality and also compounded hatred towards the very defenseless people it was supposed to empower. He however agrees that the much-articulated rage would have existed whether Tim Berners Lee had invented the web or not, but that the internet has become a platform for this hatred to thrive. This is quite true because so many people express hatred for one another on the net especially on social media.
Keen notes that according to a feminist writer women are no longer welcome on the internet where she points out to the regretful tweets she received like “Happy to say we live in the same state. I am looking you up, and when I find you, I am going to rape you and remove your head” amongst others. This clearly shows that hate and insults trade well in the world of the internet.
A 2005 Pew research equally found that the proportion of internet users who participated in online chat groups dropped from 28% in 2000 to as low as 17% in 2005, entirely because of women’s fall of in participation. Andrew keen argues that hatred is ubiquitous on the internet. “Big hatred meets big data” he adds. He further points to the negative effects of the internet by referring to several incidents of teenagers killing themselves after being bullied on the internet. He paints the internet as being disastrous.
The people formerly known as audience to Keen are not only angry; some of them are also propagandists of terror and genocide. The Arab spring for instance came as a result of the internet; undermining already established authorities and bringing down several governments. He however failed to identify that the revolution would not have been necessary or successful if the governments in place served the interest of the people. In other words, the disillusion and dissatisfaction was not caused by the internet but rather the ineptitude of the governments in place. He further argues that the internet has not only brought about deception of creating voice for the voiceless but containing misleading information like in Wikipedia when 9 out of 10 health entries contain errors due to its openness.
Fashion 3.0
Andrew keen points to the fact that the internet has grown beyond Tim O’Reilly’s web 2.0 user generated content revelation of Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube to what is now termed today as the “internet of things” revolution where we have 3D printing, wearable computing, driverless cars and intelligent drone. The maker movement he says is pioneered in Silicon Valley which brings a do-it- yourself mentality to technology where technology works akin to the human being. He however argues that this frenzy has rendered the fate of the tens of millions of people around the world already employed in industrial factories bleak because humans are being replaced by machines. He also says we are at the dawn of the age of sharing where even if you try to sell things, the world is going to share it. But that the term “Sharing” is just a euphemism for theft and the consequences of this “Makers revolution” threatens to be even more damaging than those that decimated the music industry.
He argued that creativity is no longer rewarded and recognized as anyone can copy and design and make his personalized clothing or have 3D printers rendering millions of workers employed in garment factories around the world redundant.
Chapter seven: Crystal Man
Chapter seven opens with the yet unresolved debate within the tech world over the origin and inventor of the internet which was credited to many personalities including Technologists like engineer Paul Baran of RAND, TCP/IP inventors Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, authors like Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider and Jorge Luis Borges and politicians like Albert Arnold “Al” Gore Jr. and Erich Mielke.
Keen was particular about Erich Mielke, the head of the defunct East German secret police, called the Stasi. Mielke’s Stasi was notorious for stealthy surveillance that he hired about a hundred thousand snoops and kept 39 million index cards containing stolen medical, financial, social and other personal data of East Germany citizens. Keen compares the old Stasi operations to the present insatiable thirst of data barons like Google, Facebook, Acxiom and others who will stop at nothing to make anonymity impossible.
Keen cited Consumer Electronic Show (2014) in Las Vegas organized by technology companies in their quest to make privacy a scarce commodity. At this colossal exhibition, devises like cameras that could peep under walls and through clothings, eyeglasses that records whatever they see, all-seeing connected cars, intelligent televisions that record our viewing habits, hats and hoodies outfitted with sensor chips that instantly revealed the location of their wearer and many others aiding the development of the age of “ubiquitous surveillance” were all in display. However, the users may think they use these devises to look at the world; they are the ones that are actually being watched.
In contrast with Stasi’s surreptitious manner of data grabbing, these tech companies make their products and services free as bait for “collecting, packaging and selling personal information, often without users’ full knowledge and sometimes without their informed consent.” This deceptive data gathering process has led to a digital surveillance architecture that “exceeds even anything that Erich Mielke, in his wildest imagination, ever dreamed up.” However, unlike Mielke who was arrested in 1990 for his backdoor access to the data of East Germany citizens, imprisoned in 1993, and died in 2000, contemporary internet “data monsters” are becoming wealthier and are even in cahoots with government agencies.
Keen warns that with the internet of things making everything networked from Smart air conditioner, to smart clothing and to Smartphones all capturing and distributing user’s data to the network, right to private life may soon become a thing of the past.
Chapter eight: Epic fail
In allusion to George Orwell’s 1984 paradoxical party slogan, War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, and Ignorance is Strength, Andrew keen reveals how Silicon Valley tech giants in the same delusional approach are “reinventing failure as the new model of success.” In an attempt to aid the dissemination of the deceit, Failure is Success, events like Failcon are organised in which some technology innovators are invited to “outfail each other” with their litany of failures which are glorified as a requisite factor on the path to innovation.
Beyond the superficial, this techno-libertarian system championed by companies like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, and others which is believed to be the answer to the twentieth century economy is inadvertently phasing out middle class retail economy through automation of their jobs. With an ample use of statistics, Keen lays bare the demographic bias in employment as it relates to age and sex which are both at the disadvantage of the old and females. Similarly, workers at these companies are faced with unfavourable working condition. With no regulation, these companies denounce corporate ethics and duties under the cloak of their “liberal twenty-first century” economy which rejects labour unionism of their staff.
While expressing his disapproval for the gross inequality and ever-widening gap in social class between the super-rich internet entrepreneurs and the impoverished non-tech residents of the bay, Keen decried the dystopia in which, instead of delivering the early promise of the internet to create a society that is progressive and equal for everyone, Silicon Valley has given us a glimpse of how some of the richest entrepreneurs even have toyed with the idea of creating a new type of secessionism, an ‘opt-in’ world that is separate from the old one. An example of this is the venture capitalist Tim Draper’s idea to create Silicon Valley as a new state, and startup entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan’s notion of a complete withdrawal of Silicon Valley from the United States.
The lure of high daily Airbn rates is causing landlords to drive up long-term rents in San Francisco and elsewhere, which is not good news for those who don’t take the “Google bus” to work. Twitter offers its employees free food, which “has destroyed the business of local restaurants and cafes”. The music industry, meanwhile, has been savagely injured by what Keen calls the “networked kleptocracy” inaugurated by Napster et al.
Keen is especially angry about what has happened to music, since, as he relates, he grew up at the end of the golden age of Soho record shops, and founded his own early music startup, Audio Cafe. “Back then,” he confesses, disarmingly, “it really did seem as if the internet was the answer. The web ‘changed everything’ about the music industry, I promised my investors.” As it turned out, it did, but not in a good way.
Rather than regulate the activities of these rich companies, government is instead encouraging them with tax breaks being granted to them which is being rewarded by a “predictable set of self-interested charity projects” like dance classes instead of job training.
The huge concentration of wealth in the tech industry, and, specifically, in the San Francisco Bay area, is a stark reminder of rising inequality. “The mistake of the online envangelist has been to assume that the internet’s open, decentred technology naturally translates into a less hierarchical or unequal society”, Keen writes. Instead, it has led to one of biggest ever concentration of corporate power though it has yet to see how durable those new business empires will be.
On the flip side, some parts of the book sounded like the rant of a frustrated and failed entrepreneur considering that Keen himself was an early Silicon Valley investor whose establishment Audio café, failed at its nascent stage. The book’s regular reference to how rich the successful entrepreneurs are makes this glaring.
Andrew Keen condemned the effect of internet on jobs but failed to acknowledge the complexity of a dynamic economic where a creative destruction of an old order gives birth to new opportunities. For example, Amazon may in fact have disrupted the retail market, it has however opened up a global platform that was prior to the internet age non-existent, where many people can sell, buy and publish without the usual bottlenecks that characterize older establishments. In addition, blaming Instagram and other image sharing apps for the demise of a high labour engaging company like Kodak can be likened to bemoaning the death of Portrait art in the face of Kodak.
Similarly, framing the internet with all its global intricacies through the eyes of Silicon Valley is rather parochial. Although Silicon Valley is regarded as the base of most internet companies, drawing global inferences from such local peculiarities makes Andrew Keen such a cynical writer. This is because the same situation cannot be said to be obtainable everywhere. Besides, economic divisions in San Francisco can never be said to be the makings of Internet, but Andrew Keen book makes the state look like a rather classless society before the internet emerged.
However, this is not to disregard the fact that the book was right-on on some downsides of the internet which call for serious concern and if unchecked may have a damaging effect on our socio-economic life.
The AnswerAnswer
Andrew keen having traced and given an extensive argument on the negativity of the internet, resorted to projecting the way out of what is purported to be meant for the benefit of everyone but only serving as a profit making tool for its proprietors. He argues here that the answers to the internet’s failure are diverse. Some are more coherent and viable than others; but they are undisputable responses to the wrenching economic and social dislocation of networked society. He notes that governments should be up and doing in making legal provisions regulating and restraining the internet’s monopolistic tendencies; cues should be taken from the Magna Carta for instance, a digital Bill of Rights that protect the web’s neutrality and openness both government and internet corporations.
The answer to keen is shaping the internet’s quasi monopolies. The answer is an accountable strong government able to stand up to the alien forces of Silicon Valley big data companies. Keen further emphasizes that it’s not just Google that needs to be confronted by the government. The answer to him also lies in a bold political response to other internet giants like Jeff Bezo’s Amazon. It was equally noted that the answer can’t just be more regulation from the government, the answer lies in our new digital elite becoming accountable for the most traumatic socio-economic disruption since the industrial revolution. Rather than think differently, the ethics of this new elite should be to think differently.
Conclusion
The prevalence and reliance on the internet continues to grow tremendously as it provides lots of information and services. The internet permeates virtually every aspect of our daily endeavours from shopping, financial services, educational activities, entertainment and peer to peer communication (social media). It has become a force to be reckoned with as far our universe is concerned. Therefore, despite its criticisms and negative impacts such as fraud, the internet has ultimately presented itself as the answer.
References:
Adamu, L. (2013). Prospects and challenges of media convergence in Nigeria.
Communication and the new media in Nigeria: social engagements, political
development and public discourse publisher & page
Bellis, M. (2017). "History of photography and the camera. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-photography-and-the-camera-199233
Fidler R (1997). Mediamorphosis: Understanding the New Media. Pine Forge Press; California
McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of a typographic man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Comments
Post a Comment