Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Keen, journalist, polemicist and self-styled Antichrist of Silicon Valley. Keen's new book, The Internet is Not the Answer, is being published by Atlantic in 2015, a historical reflection on the World Wide Web 25 years after its creation.
Keen observers will feel on familiar ground. In his previous two published books Keen has identified and reflected on the dark-underbelly of first Web 2.0 (The Cult of the Amateur), and Web 3.0 (Digital Vertigo). In both books Keen explores the destructive, destabilising impact of social media, rather than the positive benefits of sharing sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In Digital Vertigo, for example, he wrote how our constant interaction with social media means we are "simultaneously detached from the world and yet jarringly ubiquitous".
