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

By Andrew Keen

Categories: Computers & Technology, Politics & Social Sciences

Andrew Keen argues that social media is turning the world into a digital Panopticon, the all-seeing prison designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose preserved body, the Auto-Icon, serves him as an image of permanent public display. Taking his title from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Keen warns that the cult of sharing and radical transparency promoted by Silicon Valley figures such as the LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman threatens privacy, autonomy and individual identity, tempting people to fall for idealized online versions of themselves.

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• Ryan Holiday: “In 2007, before Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen published a prescient critique of Web 2.0 culture titled The Cult of the Amateur, a book that anticipated many of the problems of the web today. It was, thankfully, a runaway bestseller.”