Andrew Keen is a self-proclaimed internet entrepreneur, who currently works in and around the Silicon Valley’s tech industry. He writes the social history (and present) of the internet in his book , Digital Vertigo. Like the title insinuates, the findings are dizzying. Keen uses a real life experience wherein he was visiting the gravesite of Jeremy Bentham. In essence Keen compares the modern man’s obsession with social media to Bentham’s wish for a publicly displayed burial site.
An equally dark image Keen presents is of the internet’s progress as a comparison to French philosopher Michel Foucoult’s Panopticon. In Keen’s words, the circular prison system described by Foulcoult offers hypervisibility to those who wish to peer into the lives of those held captive. Keen also mentions Bentham’s Inspection-House. He sees the internet as a catch all for individual narcissism. Where someone can share very aspect of their lives in the social sphere; our lives have become hypervisible. He warns that not enough safety’s have been put in place to protect an individual’s right to privacy.
Failing to properly as- semble the social media airplane after jumping off that cliff and crashing to the ground means jeopardizing those precious rights to individual privacy, secrecy and, yes, the liberty that individuals have won over the last millennium. That is the fear, the warning of failure and collective self-destruction in Digital Vertigo.
Keen cites conversations he had with social media moguls in which these titans of technology claim that humans are essentially social animals. They even go as far as to claim that the world will become entirely socialized within the net five years.
“And no matter where you go,” he told Robert Scoble, Silicon Valley’s uber-evangelist of social media, “we want to ensure that every experience you have will be social.”
As I read Keen’s account of the over-socialization of the human experience, I find myself agreeing with one of Keen’s descriptors in particular – schizophrenic – “simultaneously detached from the world and yet jarringly ubiquitous”. Our online experience is so removed from reality, but it is at the same time becoming our new reality. I personally believe that what Foucoult said is true – “Visibility is a trap”. As our lives become more and more accessible to the public, we lose a sense of individuality that comes with a detachement from social media.
As a final note, this class we are taking is in itself a socialized version of something that used to be wholly individualistic. One’s academic pursuits and performance used to be private, but now we have created an atmosphere in which one’s performance is visible to the entire class. The benefit of which is up to us to decide.
By mid-2011, the Pew Research Center found that 65 percent of American adults were using social-networking sites—up from just 5 percent in 2005.65 In June 2010, Americans spent almost 23 percent of their online time in social media networking—up a staggering 43 percent from June 2009,66 with use among older adults (50–64 year olds) almost doubling in this period and the 65+ demographic being the fastest growing age group on Facebook in 2010 with a 124 percent increase in sign-ups over 2009. And by the summer of 2011, the Pew Research Center found that this number has risen dramatically again, with 32 percent of fifty- to sixty-four-year-olds in America accessing networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook on a daily basis.
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