Book Review

Andrew Keen. Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2012. 246 pp. + Endnotes, Index. $25.99. ISBN 978-0-312-62498-9.

Our present technological age is defined by social media. Revolutions in social networking and portable technologies allow users to be in constant contact with people and information while forming online communities based on likes and dislikes. But are these digital communities truly improving our way of life? Are digital identities really an extension of our physical selves, or are we compelled to identify with certain characteristics, communities, and people for the sole purpose of fitting in? Advances in technology and the ability for users to remain in constant contact with their social networks has ushered in a new age of transparency, "The Age of Great Exhibitionism," which entrepreneur and tech-journalist Andrew Keen argues is dividing, diminishing, and disorienting us. Digital Vertigo reflects Keen's measured observation of the dominant trends in the scholarship, and provides a comprehensive introduction to the political concerns about media and individual freedoms, commercial interests and "five-year plans" of tech-entrepreneurs, psychological research concerning the disconnect between our digital and physical selves, and, finally, the prevailing philosophies that inform debates about the 'oil' of the twenty-first century: information.

In Digital Vertigo Keen sets out to understand why "human beings are defined by their desire to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain, to prefer the eternal glare of public exposure over the everlasting privacy of the grave?" (2). The social media and digital revolutions have transformed our everyday lives and interactions by providing the tools to connect to and operate within a global community. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, blogs, and other social networks allow their users to share their lives and their identities more easily, more quickly, and more totally than before. Keen argues, however, that the benefits of digital interactions are over-exaggerated by tech-entrepreneurs (Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for instance). Keen writes, that "...rather than uniting us between the digital pillars of Aristotelian polis, today's social media is actually splintering our identities so that we always exist outside ourselves, unable to concentrate on the here-and-now, too wedded to our own image, perpetually revealing our current location, our privacy sacrificed to the utilitarian tyranny of a collective network" (15).

Advancements and proposed innovations in the social media landscape in recent years offer some unsettling changes to the relationship between humans and technology. "Frictionless sharing," as Keen defines the new relationship, is the result of social media's increased integration with our daily technologies. The future of social media, and the dreams of social media entrepreneurs, is more openness, the creation of a transparent network of individuals sharing more and more about their lives by the second. An always-on, always-connected, and constantly sharing world dreamt of by Zuckerberg et al. was depicted satirically in Gary Shteyngart's 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story. Our devices are the "little brothers" of George Orwell's Big Brother of Nineteen Eighty-four fame: omnipresent and nefarious tools of communication and surveillance: "We see the return of the apparatchik as an omniscient wireless device. We see a society that is becoming its own electronic image, a (dis)unity of little brothers. We see human beings turned inside out, so that all their most intimate data is displayed in the full gaze of the public network. We see a reputation economy in which respect, love, friendship and trust are replacing cash as society's scarcest and thus its most valuable commodity. We see a Super Sad True Love Story featuring global super-nodes with millions of friends who don't know the names of their neighbors. We see digital vertigo. More and more digital vertigo...(144).

The threat that social media poses to the future of society is a digital environment in which users share information about themselves and each other at an alarming rate. Information becomes the leading commodity on the planet, and our digital reputations are more important than our physical interactions with others. Keen asks, however, "What will be the fate of the dissenters, of those who don't update? What, I wondered, in a world in which we all exist on the Internet, will become of those who protect their own privacy, who pride themselves on their illegibility, who--in the timeless words of Brandeis and Warren--just want to be let alone? Will they be alive, I wondered, or will they be dead?" (12-13). Social media's continued evolution and society's increased dependence on social media interactions has the potential to ruin reputations that were otherwise protected before the advent of social media. Scandals used to be the result of intense investigation that used various methods of sleuthing to uncover clues. Our future reputations are now threatened by photos and status updates posted on Facebook, GooglePlus, Twitter, and other social media.

Our relationship with social media is paradoxical because users are expected to constantly share information about themselves or they face scorn from their peers. Our physical interactions are the source of much digital sharing, but we are often more concerned with cultivating our online identities than strengthening our physical relationships with others. The loss of physical interactions is troubling, and the consequence of increased digital transparency is the potential loss of our sense of identity: "In the great exhibitionism of our hypervisible Web 3.0 world, when 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" (190). Such a loss of self-concept could lead to future crises of identity, which is a serious concern that Keen addresses in his book, though better treatments of the psychological problems related to social media exist elsewhere (e.g. Sherry Turkle's Alone Together [2012]).

Keen's book is a welcome addition to the literature on the impact of technology on the psyche, society, and globalization. Digital Vertigo is so alluring because it offers a cautionary tale of how social media is a double-edged sword. Keen's observations are not bleak, like those offered in Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion (2010), nor utopian like those in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008). Keen describes the inherent benefits of social media, but cautions users to think about what they are sharing and how frequently. For an author who has made his living and fame within the technology community through social media and Internet journalism, the observations published in Digital Vertigo accord with those scholarly studies offered by 'traditional' academics. Studies that treat aspects of Keen's work with greater expertise do exist, but Keen adroitly weaves together and synthesizes many of the popular and leading perspectives which dominate academic disciplines tied to technology studies today.

In some instances, however, Keen's book fails to fully convey or misses the mark entirely when treating more complex topics related to technology and society. The book also suffers from editorial oversights in the form of frequent typos and overused adjectives. "Creepy" occurs so often that it becomes hyper-normalized and loses its intended effect. Scholarly publications that treat individual topics with greater depth and expertise exist, but it is safe to recommend Keen's volume as starting point for understanding dominant trends among scholars. In summary, Keen's Digital Vertigo is a contemporary example of thorough scholarship distilled to a single introductory volume that would serve any teacher or student of technology and the digital evolution well.

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