(CNN) -- The news last week was all about Facebook's dodgy IPO. Investors are filing suit against Facebook about withholding "negative" assessment on its business prospects. This IPO not only "Zucked up" Silicon Valley's supposed tech bubble, but it has created the suspicion that Facebook willfully exploited the innocence of the small investor.

But something even dodgier than a potential stock market fraud is going on. The social network is taking something much more important than money from its nearly one billion members. By sabotaging what it really means to be human, Facebook is stealing the innocence of our inner lives.

Oh, Zuck: Facebook's bumpy start just got a little worse

It may even be Zucking us up as a species.
Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us there's a "shift" from an analog world in which our identities are generated from within, to a digital world in which our sense of self is intimately tied to our social media presence.

But this shift to a Facebook world of incessant "friending," Professor Turkle correctly warns us, is a "seductive fantasy" which is weakening us both as individuals and as a society. The problem, she explains, is that a "capacity for solitude is what nurtures great relationships." But in today's always-on social media world, our solitude has been replaced by incessant online updates, which both weaken our sense of self and our ability to create genuine friendships.

I call this shift from the private to the public self "digital narcissism." Behind the communitarian veil of social media, we have fallen in love with ourselves. But this is a super sad love story. Because the more we self-broadcast, the emptier we become; and the emptier we become, the more we need to self-broadcast.

Opinion: We expect more from technology and less from each other

The more we self-broadcast, the emptier we become; and the emptier we become, the more we need to self-broadcast
Facebook isn't alone, of course, in offering this seductive fantasy of a radically transparent digital society in which our self esteem is determined by our updates, tweets and check-ins. And yet with its almost billion members and nearly $100 billion public market valuation, Facebook is shaping the digital narcissism of early 21st century culture more than any other social media company.

Most of all, Facebook is destroying our privacy as discrete individuals. And it's not just our kids who are revealing everything about themselves to their thousands of "friends" on Facebook. As Aisha Sultan and Jon Miller note in a chilling piece, "Facebook parenting" -- our obsession with posting data about our kids - is "destroying our children's privacy."

Sultan, a parenting columnist at the St Louis Post-Dispatch, and Miller, a researcher at the University of Michigan, whose article was based on interviews with 4,000 children, argue that we've created what they call a sense of "normality" about a world where "what's private is public." Kids are growing up, they explain, assuming that it's perfectly normal to reveal everything about ourselves online.

"And our children will never have known a world without this sort of exposure. What does a worldview lacking an expectation of privacy mean for the rest of society?" Sultan and Miller conclude with the eeriest of questions.

What it means, of course, is that we are creating a world in which our sense of identity, of who we actually are, is defined by what others think of us. Social media's ubiquity means that we are losing that most precious of human things -- our sense of self . Our devices are always on; our "Timeline" (Facebook's product which greedily attempts to capture our entire life narrative) is there for everyone to see; we are living in public on a radically transparent global network that, by 2020, will be fed by 50 billion intelligent devices carried by the majority of people on the planet.

But the situation is actually more dismal than even Sultan and Miller acknowledge. The distinguished psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan have written about an entire generation of young men who, they say, have been "desensitized to reality" by online gaming and pornography. But what Zimbardo and Duncan forget to add is that much social media is no less addictive that gaming or porn.

Yes, digital narcissism is a narcotic. But unlike online gaming or pornography, it is desensitizing all of us -- young and old, men and women alike -- to reality. Imprisoned in our delusional social media bubbles, our Facebook saturated world has become a self-referential stream of real-time updates about what we just ate for breakfast.

Don't worry about whether the Facebook IPO is creating an economic bubble. The real bubble are the billions of delusional social media bubbles which are distorting our real sense of self and weakening genuine social interaction.

So what to do?

The less we publicly announce about ourselves, the more mysterious and thus the more interesting our private selves become.
Andrew Keen It's time to wake up to the truth about social media. Networks like Facebook have turned us into products in which their only economic value is our personal data. Like any other addiction, we need recognize its destructive reality. Facebook is free because it sells our most intimate data to advertisers. Forget about last week's dodgy IPO. The fraud is on anyone who has ever used Facebook.

Last year, I quit Facebook. It's a growing movement. I hope you'll consider joining me as a Facebook resistor.

But the solution goes beyond leaving Facebook. Our addiction to digital narcissism can only be broken by a new regime of strict self-censorship. For many of us, perpetually high on the narcotic of self-broadcast, this won't be any easier than quitting smoking or kicking that online porn or gaming habit. But remember, the less we publicly announce about ourselves, the more mysterious and thus the more interesting our private selves become.

There are political solutions too. We need to support governments in both the E.U. and the U.S. to protect online privacy through "do not track" legislation; force companies like Google to be more transparent with their use of our data and even enshrine, as the EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is bravely championing, a "law of forgetting" on the Internet.

The market can also play a role. Let's embrace new technology which allows data to degenerate over time so our online data, like real world trash, eventually decomposes.

Let's support Internet start-ups like the strictly private social network EveryMe and the defiantly private search engine DuckDuckGo. And let's recognize, once and for all, that "free" is never really free and that we are much better off paying for apps and services that absolutely guarantee the protection of our private personal data.

At the dawn of our brave new networked 21st century world, we are faced with two options. Either, we succumb to the narcotic of digital narcissism, turn ourselves inside out and let our kids inherit a world in which the quiet mystery of the disciplined private self becomes a historical artifact. Or we fight our growing addiction to social media so that we are no longer enslaved to the personal update, the tweet or the check-in.

Privacy or publicness? It's not a hard choice. Zuck-up or save the species. I trust you'll know which one to make.

• Follow @ajkeen on Twitter
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Andrew Keen from CNN
Editor's note: Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur and professional skeptic. He is the author of "The Cult of the Amateur," and "Digital Vertigo." This is the latest in a series of commentaries for CNN looking at how internet trends are influencing social culture.

Altier Dahmir uses a table saw everyday cutting wood for custom floors.  But a couple of months ago, in March, he  he ran his finger through the saw, cutting half of it off. There was nothing was left to re-attach, what doctors told him was disheartening.

"The option you have is either we shorten the finger, or we put you through two procedures or more, and I can't guarantee you will have full function, full sensation," said Dr. Francisco Schwartz-Fernandes, Altier's hand surgeon.

Either way, Altier faced at least five months of healing.  That's when his wife asked about something new: a wound healing powder nicknamed "pixie dust." 

A couple of days later, right in Dr. Schwartz-Fernandes' office, Altier's wound was coated with a white powder that's actually called Matri-Stem.  Think of it as the general contractor at a construction site. It calls in specialized crews—or in this case cells—to rebuild Altier's fingertip, including nerves, nail and fingerprint.  But instead of taking five months, using Matri-stem, it took only five weeks.

  ore than 600 miles away, there's a different solution in the works.  Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina gave us a first-hand look at how it works.

Using the dome-shaped mold, scientists are constructing a bladder. "We have a major shortage of organs, mainly because we're living longer," said Dr. Anthony Atala. Organ shortages are the driving force for Dr. Atala.  He is a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine.   His dream is to grow organs we can't reject using cells from our own bodies. "We take a very small piece of tissue from the patient about half the size of a postage stamp," Atala said.
It takes a month for those cells to multiply.

"The cells are placed on the biomaterial, and it's like a sandwich. You have muscle cells on the outside; you have lining cells on the inside." That bio-material is like the steel beams of a building, shaping the organ.  It eventually disintegrates, leaving only the cells behind.  Making organs by hand takes time.  But Dr. Atala is now automating the process using printers. This high-tech printer processes images from MRIs and creates a 3-D blue print for an ear, a finger bone, even a kidney.

"We've already made miniature kidneys that we've been able to implant experimentally and image urine, so we know that the technology is feasible. The challenge for us is, how do we take that miniature kidney and make it a larger structure—and that's where the printer is helping us," he said.

In the labs, bio-reactors keep the fabricated creations alive.  Dr. Atala shows a heart-valve structure that is pumping away. The heart valve came from a pig, and all the cells were removed and replaced with human ones.

These units train regenerated parts to function as they would in our bodies. They are structures that could someday save lives.  Dr. Atala hopes the lab-grown arteries will help people with peripheral artery diseases and other blood vessel diseases.

Altier says he was both surprised and happy with his results.  Dr. Schwartz-Fernandes was especially impressed that the feeling returned to Altier's finger.  "Every cell in your body has all the information necessary to create a whole new you," Dr. Atala said.  He hopes that someday, organ regeneration will take place inside the body, but says that may be decades away. 

For more information:

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Dr. Anthony Atala

http://www.wakehealth.edu/WFIRM/

  The Huffington Post  |  By Harry Bradford Posted: 05/17/2012 8:06 am Updated: 05/17/2012 10:16 am