44
ANDREW KEEN
represent the end of the world. It means the end of the isolated reader, the end of solitary thought, the end of purely individual literary reflection, the end of those long afternoons spent entirely alone with just a book. Ner vous about the coming social dictatorship? Need a cigarette break with fellow smokers? Don’t worry, there is even a social networking device for smokers, introduced by a company called Blu in June 2011, which sells electronically enhanced e-cigarettes ($80 for a five pack) that enable their owners to download their contact information onto personal computers and connect with other smokers.164 Endomondo, indeed. SocialEyes Is Creepy MingleBird, PeekYou, Hotlist, Rypple, Scribn, Sonar, Quora and Togetherville and the thousands of Web 3.0 companies are creating, social brick by social brick, a global networked electronic Inspection-House, a twenty-firstcentury home in which we can all watch each other all of the time. Take, for example, SocialEyes (pronounced socialize), the social video start-up founded by Rob Glaser, the former Microsoft executive and CEO of RealNetworks, and backed by a number of blue chip West Coast venture capital firms. Launched in beta form in March 2011, SocialEyes unintentionally captures the matrix for our age of great exhibitionism, making it a metaphorical picture of our collective future. “It looks like there is a wall of video cubes, like the set of Hollywood Squares,” Glaser explained the SocialEyes interface.“You can see yourself in one of these squares and then start initiating phone calls to anyone in your network.”165 This is the true picture of the social web. When we socialize on SocialEyes, the world becomes a gigantically transparent set of Hollywood Squares and we all become cubes inside its wall. -1—
You’ll remember that @quixotic once said that his goal was to provide
0—
society with a lens to who are we and who should we be, as individuals and a
+1—
053-49536_ch01_3P.indd 44
2/14/12 1:46 AM