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

Digital Vertigo provides an articulate measured contrarian voice against a sea of hype about social media. As an avowed technology optimist Im grateful for Keen who makes me stop and think before committing myself fully to the social revolution. ―Larry Downes author of The Killer App. In Digital Vertigo Andrew Keen presents todays social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from todays online networking revolution and critiques of social companies like Groupon Zynga and LinkedIn Keen argues that the social media transformation is weakening disorienting and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age. The tragic paradox of life in the social media age Keen says is the incompatibility between our internet longings for community and friendship and our equally powerful desire for online individual freedom. By exposing the shallow core of social networks like Facebook Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.