Digital Vertigo

March 19, 2012
With Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” in mind, self-appointed “tech Anti-Christ” Keen (The Cult of the Amateur) presents his deepest Orwellian pessimism of a socially-mediated future and laments an increasing lack of privacy as Facebook, Twitter, and a dizzying array of wannabes come to dominate our interconnected world. Unfortunately, his obsession with privacy and authority blinds him to real problems of media illiteracy or a dearth of truly public space. A public figure with more than 11,000 Twitter followers, Keen also seems to miss the point that one can opt out of social media entirely, while his alarmist stance willfully ignores their potential benefits. His inherently conservative, fearful position is constructed upon a foundation of fallacies, strawman arguments, and a woefully inadequate understanding of basic sociology. He also tends to pass off assumptions as fact and make claims to universality that are questionable at best. Even Keen’s appeals to some static ideal of “personhood” and “human-ness” that is being erased betray an ignorance of modern psychology or neuroscience. This is not to say that social media is without problems or above criticism, but those leveled here make it difficult to see the book as more than paranoid technophobia. Agent: Stephen Hanselman, Level Five Media