The Internet Needs To Grow Up: A Conversation with Andrew Keen

At the time of the invention of writing, Socrates worried that it would destroy memory, and undermine the oral tradition. The invention of the printing press worried many. For those old enough you remember, the fear of television was once pervasive. It was the “boob tube,” “the vast wasteland.” We fragmented over other great changes, including the great migration and the move from a rural agrarian culture to an urban industrial revolution.

All of these changes came with great promise and predictive as well as unintended consequences. Why should we think that the Internet, that the digital revolution, would be any different? As someone once said, “history may repeat itself exactly, but it certainly rhymes.”

Andrew Keen has, with an objective eye, been following this history since the dawn of the information age. He wrote about the democratization of information in his book THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR, and he warned us how social media would, rather than brings us together, fragment us and feed into our narcissism.

Now in HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE, he pulls together all of the consequences of tech. He shows us what Joan Didion once said of Southern California, is true of tech, that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.

My WhoWhatWhy Conversation with Andrew Keen

The Internet is Not the Answer

The industrial revolution changed the world. It changed the nature of work, it displaced workers, it ushered in the Gilded Age and created more inequality. It shrank the world, drove consumerism, and reshaped political ideology.

The Internet revolution, 150 years later, has had startling similar effects. We worship at the altar of creative destruction, we fetishize technology and the freedom and democratization that the Internet had promised. But at what price?

Simply, can the same technology and companies that fractured and reshaped the world, now be what we need to put it back together again?

Andrew Keen, argues that The Internet Is Not the Answer.

My conversation with Andrew Keen:

The real digital divide

If you watch movies or read novels or simply understand the drama that is the human condition, you know that human behavior is often shrouded in mystery. Why we do what we do, how we act and what we think about at four AM, are at the heart of what make us who we are, and in fact what makes us interesting. On the other hand, if we reveal everything about ourselves; if Facebook, and LinkedIn and social networks in general track our every move, our every action, where is the mystery? If every thought is posted, or tweeted, or shared, then where is the human discovery? If we forget that we are more than the sum total of our data points, then Andrew Keene is here to remind us. Keen argues in his new work Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, that the social network may be weakening, not building up our relationships.

My conversation with Andrew Keen:

Click here to listen on your iphone or ipad