Untangling the Web: What the Internet Is Doing to You - Aleks Krotoski [epub]

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.

About the Author

ALEKS KROTOSKI is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. Aleks' PhD thesis in Social Psychology (University of Surrey, 2009) examined how information spreads around the social networks of the World Wide Web. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Read up on her academic and research activities and interests here. Aleks presented the Emmy and Bafta winning BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution in 2010, about the social history of the World Wide Web. In her blog for the project she outlined her manifestos about the social, political, economic and psychological impact of 20 years of the Web. She writes for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology podcast. Her writing also appears in Nature, BBC Technology, New Statesman, MIT Technology Review and the Telegraph. She is also the New Media Sector Champion for UKTI, the government department that promotes British businesses around the world.