Digital Vertigo

Social media is, thus, like home; it is the architecture in which we now live.

Andrew Keen is a business man in the tech industry of Silicon Valley. He is also very opinionated on the current Internet Culture, as his work is based in this. This excerpt from Digital Vertigo shows how culture has been changed from increased forms of social media, as well as internet usage in general. He presents a very basic look at the digital age, and demonstrates how his involvement in this industry has linked him to many influential individuals.

Keen argues that in the past, there has been a distinct “Real World” and “Social Media World” but now the latter is becoming the former. As people spend more and more time online, that becomes their world; their Avatars are their real selves. Everything we need is online. You can shop for virtually anything, be entertained with movies, tv, and other sites, and even cure loneliness, as is the aim of social media. This is becoming the world we live in, as we are constantly connected to it.

This constant connectedness is aided by the sharing of ones “Location” by many devices. With our cell phones, tablets, iProducts, and the like, constantly showing out location, we can never truly escape from social media and the digital world.

But  no, rather than uniting us between the digital pillars of an 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 in our own image, perpetually revealing our current location, our privacy sacrificed to the utilitarian tyranny of a collective network.

This concept of sharing one’s current location can also be seen in an interview with Andrew Keen and Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless.

Ted Morgan- Why Skyhook Has Become A Harvard Business School Case Study

Skyhook was the first company to develop the technology of “Current Location” through WiFi. They have revolutionized the advertising industry because of this, collecting data from users on their location and behavior on their device embedded with this technology. As more companies have developed their own version of this technology, Skyhook has been the most successful, and is on millions of devices.

So if we are to blame and individual or organization for knowing our locations, behaviors, or the apps we frequent, it’s Ted Morgan and Skyhook. Having grown up in a time where the world was not yet connected to the internet, and therefore not connected with each other, I can say that we have come a long way. Keen dramatically implies how our lives are becoming progressively more “web-intensive”, that we thrive to share our ideas, videos, pictures, etc. in a way that is almost narcissistic. Although I wish that this weren’t true of myself, I do indulge in many a social media site, and share my thoughts, ideas, and cute cat videos that I come across. But in the grand scheme of things, is this my “real” life? I don’t think so. There are times when I feel suffocated by technology and my constant connectedness to people. An introvert in nature, I don’t always feel the need to post on a friend’s wall just for the heck of it, or retweet something funny said by a celeb that I follow, because I don’t think its necessary. And although there are great things that can be found on the internet, somethings are best enjoyed out in the mountains at my Colorado home, where I have zero cell servies and questionable WiFi coverage (although I may instagram my pictures when I return to the land of internet usage).