Digital Vertigo

Internet entrepreneur Keen (The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today's User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values) is known for voicing his concerns about how the Internet has a negative impact on contemporary culture. Similar to titles such as Nicholas Carr's The Shallows and Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, his latest looks at how, since industrialization, society's feelings about community, transparency, privacy, and the right to be "let alone" have changed. While the vision of an open, global community where we never have to be lonely sounds attractive on the surface, Keen strongly advocates for thinking carefully about what we're sharing, whom we're sharing with, who's profiting from it, and what they're doing with that information. The book provides a thoughtful warning about the potential moral and ethical consequences of oversharing.