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

Andrew Keen

St. Martin's Press, May 22, 2012 - Business & Economics - 240 pages

"Digital Vertigo provides an articulate, measured, contrarian voice against a sea of hype about social media. As an avowed technology optimist, I'm 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 today’s social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today’s 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, Andrew Keen shows us that  the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we seem to be.  

What people are saying

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

User Review  - Laurel - Goodreads

Keen presents a very good overview of web 3.0 and how it is impacting (from his perspective) our private life. He is an excellent writer which made reading this book pleasurable, although I am not ...

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

User Review - Goodreads

I put this in my "reading might never finish" shelf and returned it to the library only having read half of it, because I was fed up with the bad writing (or bad translation). I'm still curious ...

About the author

ANDREW KEEN, author of The Cult of the Amateur, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose writings on culture, media, and technology have appeared in The Weekly Standard, Fast Company, The San Francisco Chronicle, Listener, and Jazziz. He lives in Santa Rosa, California.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us
• Author: Andrew Keen
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2012
• ISBN: 1429940964, 9781429940962
• Length: 240 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Workplace Culture; Computers / Social Aspects / General