E-Book Overview
The World Wide Web is the most revolutionary innovation of our time. In the last decade, it has utterly transformed our lives. But what real effects is it having on our social world? What does it mean to be a modern family when dinner table conversations take place over smartphones? What happens to privacy when we readily share our personal lives with friends and corporations? Are our Facebook updates and Twitterings inspiring revolution or are they just a symptom of our global narcissism? What counts as celebrity, when everyone can have a following or be a paparazzo? And what happens to relationships when love, sex and hate can be mediated by a computer? Social psychologist Aleks Krotoski has spent a decade untangling the effects of the Web on how we work, live and play. In this groundbreaking book, she uncovers how much humanity has - and hasn't - changed because of our increasingly co-dependent relationship with the computer. In Untangling the Web, she tells the story of how the network became woven in our lives, and what it means to be alive in the age of the Internet.
E-Book Content
CONTENTS Title Page Acknowledgements Introduction UNTANGLING ME A nation of narcissists Life after death Losing my mind UNTANGLING US eWe Untangling the bedsheets Where have all the kids gone? 700 friends on Facebook iLove iHate UNTANGLING SOCIET Y iHide Grassroots politics, global revolution Misinformation, disinformation and the press Consulting Dr Web Home is where the hub is LOL: the internet is made of cats, and other memes God online UNTANGLING T HE FUT URE Ideologies of the technologies References Index About the Author Copyright ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book is the product of thirteen years of research, as a journalist and as an academic. The chapters have appeared, some in more similar guises than others, in the Observer and the Guardian, on the BBC website, on BBC Two’s The Virtual Revolution, on Radio 4’s Digital Human, on the Digital Media and Learning blog and in The Political Quarterly. Some had their first iterations as lectures at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the University of Glasgow, the University of Nottingham, The Economist, Google, the Royal Institution and the Internet Advertising Bureau. They’ve been presented to audiences from the UK, the US, Singapore, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Australia, Greece, Denmark, Belgium and France. Most importantly to my personal sense of completion, several chapters have been adapted from my PhD. It is, therefore, unsurprising that there are many people who contributed to these pages. I’d like to thank my editors Katie Roden, Charles Arthur, Caspar Llewellyn-Smith, Killian Fox, Ian Tucker and Phil Daoust for harnessing my verbosity; my research supervisors Julie Barnett and Evanthia Lyons for keeping me on target; my parents Danuta and Wojciech for their continuing and enduring support; my friends Amber Templemore-Finlayson, Devina Sivagurunathan, Marie Campbell, Kate Bevan, Sam Pinney, Denise Hanrahan, Roslyn Smith and Kaitlin Thaney for reading early versions of these chapters; Gregor and Ally McMurtrie for the loan of their home in idyllic Findochty, Scotland to hammer out draft two; and Ben Hammersley for helping me cross the finish line. INTRODUCTION More than two billion people, from Peterborough to Pretoria, from Toronto to Timbuktu, from Amsterdam to Abu Dhabi, use the world wide web. There are over 2.5 billion searches for information and insight on Google every day. Nine hundred million of us connect and share on the world’s largest social network, Facebook. More than 500 million of us tell friends, lovers, strangers and stalkers what we had for breakfast on Twitter. And when we want to shop for books or balalaikas, hundreds of millions more point our