An Excerpt from The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen
Andrew Keen presents his critique of the warps and failings of the individuals and companies leading the Digital Revolution. Here is an excerpt on connections.
"Everything that can be connected is being connected and the amount of data being produced online is mind-boggling. Every minute of every day in 2014, for example, the 3 billion Internet users in the world sent 204 million emails, uploaded 72 hours of new YouTube videos, made over 4 million Google searches, shared 2,460,000 pieces of Facebook content, downloaded 48,000 Apple apps, spent $83,000 on Amazon, tweeted 277,000 messages, and posted 216,000 new Instagram photos ['Data Never Sleeps 2.0,' infographic from the data company Domo, domo.com/learn/data-never-sleeps-2]. We used to talk about a 'New York minute,' but today's 'Internet minute' in Marshall McLuhan's global village makes New York City seem like a sleepy village in which barely anything ever happens.
"It may be hard to imagine, especially for those so-called digital natives who have grown up taking the Internet's networking tools for granted, but the world hasn't always been a data-rich information system. Indeed, three-quarters of a century ago, back in May 1941, when those German bombers blew the British House of Commons to smithereens, nobody and nothing was connected on the network. There weren't any digital devices able to communicate with one another at all, let alone real-time Twitter or Instagram feeds keeping us in the electronic information loop.
