Andrew Keen

A scathing attack on the tyranny of the new social media. The author counterposes Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, in which everything is measured in a cost-benefit balance, against John Stuart Mill's counter-argument that what is important is the exercise of individual will and liberty. The author warns us against letting the new social media like Facebook and Twitter, with their inexorable pressure to be hyper-visible on the internet and amass thousands or millions of followers, or more likely engulf us in disappointment and self-deprecation, take over our sense of self, and suggests that a more human way of living is to live privately and with a small circle of physical friends. The author is to be lauded for fighting consistently against the tide of social visibility, although both society and economy look like being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of instant connectivity that is the feature of the world wide web.… (mer)

Another hard-hitting book in Keen's series on the Internet and the World-Wide Web. Here he documents how free access to digital media has laid low whole sectors of the economy like analog photography (think Kodak, which basically defined photography for the amateur), film making (YouTube), then popular music, newspapers and journalism, and book publishing and distribution (think Amazon). He equates this storm of destruction to the end of Western creative civilisation itself, as the creator can no longer impose their property rights on their work or get an adequate financial return. There is also the problem that much of the information posted is neither backed up by scholarship nor has undergone adequate expert or peer review, hence its integrity and truthfulness is open to question. The author suggests that there has to be some sort of social, and governmental, control over these media.… (mer)