Untangling the Web: What the Internet Is Doing To You – a compendium and expansion of the columns I wrote for The Observer newspaper (and the blog posts I wrote for The Guardian), plus ten years of headspace (academic and journalistic) – will be published 4 July 2013 in the UK by Guardian Books/Faber & Faber.
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.
Comments
Hi Aleks,
Have been waiting for the book, but now it seems not to be available on Amazon altogether :-/ Any idea?
Cheers
B.
Hi Bahareh!
It’ll be available in April next year….
Aleks
I enjoyed your LSE lecture on Tuesday, but it raised one or two issues in my mind: you mentioned those with a ‘fear’ of the net (which I assume would be those who either don’t or barely use it) and the rest of ‘us’ who are ‘all’ signed up to Facebook, Google etc etc.
Surely I can’t be the only person who uses some popular sites like Amazon, Hotmail, ebay, Flickr and LinkedIn but doesn’t concentrate too much activity/data in any one place and avoids overly-‘nosey’ sites like Facebook, Twitter and some other sites – where do we sit here?
And with as I notice, more and more companies and info offering services and info via Facebook, either as well as, or instead of having their own websites, is that effectively placing the internet inside a privately-run social network? What if state services go the same way? Should we be worried?
Hi Aleks,
I am so curious to Untangle the Web by reading your upcoming book and eagerly waiting for this book. “The Virtual Revolution” and “Digital Human” series were the priceless sources of knowledge for me. Thank you so much for bestowing your extremely valuable ideas, thoughts, and knowledge about the Virtual Digital Space.
Thanks Amrinder. Much more to come!