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

In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen illuminates 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 Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Keen argues that this social media transformation is weakening, disorienting, and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age.

Using Alfred Hitchcock's iconic film Vertigo as a metaphor for the fabric of lies we are being sold, Keen demonstrates the chilling triumph of the digital inspection house in our daily lives. 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 and our increasing captivity to Big Data, Andrew Keen shows us that the more electronically connected we become, the lonelier and less powerful we become too. Digital Vertigo offers a compelling answer to the pervasive digital utilitarianism of our age.