Today British new media critic Andrew Keen gave a lecture about his new book ‘Digital Vertigo’ at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. The book is all build around Hitchcock’s movie ‘Vertigo’ in which the main character falls in love with a woman that does not really exist. This is comparable to web 3.0 argues Keen: ‘it is making us dizzy and will result in us falling in love with something that does not really exist. It is a trick’.
The Cult of the Amateur
Before he goes any further, the author gives a short summary of his previous book ‘The Cult of the Amateur’. This book was published in 2007: the time of web 2.0. Keen criticizes of the rise of the amateur as producer of content in this book.
At the time of web 1.0, Andrew Keen was an Internet entrepreneur. He spend most of the 1990’s in putting high quality content on the internet and founded Audio Café, an attempt to put quality music on the Internet. He saw web 1.0 as a publication platform. ‘Amazon, Craig and other platforms founded at that time are all about publishing quality content. It was rather like the old publishing business’ says Andrew Keen.
Then web 2.0 came along and it became pretty easy to put content on the Internet. Web technologists developed products that allowed anyone to publish and we all became publishers, with the help of YouTube, blogging software and other new technology. ‘There are no librarians sitting in the Google search engine. It is an (supposedly) intelligent devise to define what we see online. My critique was a cultural one: user generated content is of lower quality than professional. People claim I am an elitist, and I agree. In the ‘Cult of the Amateur’ I am very critical about the free culture on the Internet because it makes it very hard for artist to make a living’ says Andrew Keen.
Digital Vertigo
Something has changed since then: we moved from web 2.0 to web 3.0. ‘They have been talking about it for a while. The difference is not really clear between the two, but there is a fundamental shift going on from an economy of links to an economy of likes’ says Andrew Keen. Web 2.0 tended to be anonymous; web 3.0 is far less anonymous and is significantly defined by Facebook. It is becoming more social.
You can say that Google was the leviathan of web 2.0 and Facebook is the leviathan of web 3.0. Facebook is a network in which we all update ourselves. This is still a bit web 2.0 because we self publish, but the whole economy is changing. This change enables us to literally live on the Internet and to know everything about each other; it is the time of ubiquitous. This fundamental change is a cultural as well as business change.
The like economy
At this moment Google is in panic. The search engine is more and more shifting from a link search engine to a like search engine, e.g. with data from Google +.
There are hundreds of thousands of new products which are designed for commerce, products that tell the world what we are listening and watching. Besides, the web is now also shaped in mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. We are revealing ourselves more than ever before.
However, Keen’s book does not embrace this: it is a warning. He questioned himself why are we embracing web 3.0 so much? He argues it is because on one hand we are increasingly becoming more narcissistic. Narcissism is not invented by the Internet, but it created more self love and we are more aware that we are interesting. Keen thinks this is a bad thing. ‘We need to find an equilibrium that is less narcissistic’ says Keen. On the other hand, Keen argues that we are increasingly living in a world where we need to reveal ourselves. We are using the networks to promote and rank ourselves; this world is a reputation economy.
Criticism
Andrew Keen has a few points of criticism in his book ‘Digital Vertigo’. One of them is defense of privacy. ‘We are destroying our privacy by using Twitter, Facebook, Goolge + and other social networking sites. The world of the private person is disappearing, but we need to maintain it. The network is becoming very aggressive in getting our data’ says Keen as a warning.
The second criticism is the fact that web 3.0 is an economy driven by personal data. Facebook is build around personal data, in contradiction to Google. Facebook knows so much about us, because the nature of Facebook is about users going online and putting content on the site. They are dangerous according to Andrew Keen, even tough they are not run by bad people. Sites like Facebook are living on our personal data and they are taking advantage of us just because they have to.
Third, Andrew Keen fears governments. By governments he does not mean the Dutch or EU government, but for example governments in countries with an oppressive regime. ‘The more data we give out, the more they can know about us. We are creating a digital Big Brother. It is a snooping economy this web 3.0 with ubiquitous personal data’ says Andrew Keen. ‘We are turned into machines, ones and zeros, ranking algorithms. I don’t want to be part of this.’
Be suspicious
As an example of the new web, the author names Empire Avenue. He is not against these networks, but he tries to understand them and to be suspicious. Empire Avenue tells us what our value is, but we shouldn’t take it too seriously he argues. This example shows the replacement of money by influence and network. ‘What I fear is that we won’t be able to escape the network. Privacy will disappear. It will know all about us: who we are, who is sitting next to us, what we do… It is an entirely different world’ says Andrew Keen. However, it is not the same as Big Brother in 1984. We can still choose what we share, like Keen doesn’t want people to know where he is.
Moreover, we are losing a kind of individuality with the rise of web 3.0. ‘You don’t want to go back to a society where everybody knows what you are doing, like in a small village’ says Andrew Keen. ‘I don’t think it is a good thing. We have many more than one identity and this should be the case on the web’.
What can be done?
The primary solution is within us. Facebook is changing the world even more dramatically than Google did, but it is for us to decide (especially for the new generation) how far we will go.
Another solution is government regulation, like the EU legislation. They are making sure that Internet companies aren’t taking advantage of us. The market is providing a third solution for the privacy issue by developing more and more entrepreneurial solutions for building privacy. A solution can also be found in technology, for example in data on the internet that erodes over time. ‘The internet doesn’t know how to forget’, says Andrew Keen, ‘maybe it should know how to forget.’
The physical versus the digital
Above all, what is clear is that the web needs to reflect the complexity of the world. ‘Hopefully we will see this reflected in more complex social networks in the near future’ says Keen. We are living in a world in which we fetishize connections and the social, but when you peal away the social layer, you see loneliness and isolation. The Internet is a cause and a consequence of this increase of loneliness. The physical world is more complex than the digital world; the network is not an adequate replacement for the physical. Besides, the people that won’t use SNS will be living in a digital cave.
Usually transparency creates generosity, but the reality is that SNS are not making us more generous or more loving. Social networking sites are not transforming us into better people. According to Keen, it is also important to learn how to separate the personal and the profession. We need to learn how to use the networks for your own interests. Everyone needs to ask themselves ‘why should I be on Facebook’?
Change
Andrew Keen ends his presentation with the argument that technology is at the heart of everything that is going on. Most things aren’t changing, but what is changing is the Internet. Technology does not change culture, but culture changes technology.
The book ‘Digital Vertigo’ will be available by the 26th of May 2012 in English and in the beginning of next year in Dutch.