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Another:
Release date: October 7, 2014

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

Synopsis:

The computer and the internet are among the most important innovations of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo inventors suitable to be singled out on magazine covers or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, and Morse. Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively. There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses. This is the story of these pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs—who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. It’s also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.

Just saw that one, thanks Jerome. On my TBR list.

Another:
Release date: October 14, 2014

Ada's Algorithm: How Lord Byron's Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age

by James Essinger (no photo)

Synopsis:

Over 150 years after her death, a widely-used scientific computer program was named “Ada,� after Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the eighteenth century’s version of a rock star, Lord Byron. Why?

Because, after computer pioneers such as Alan Turing began to rediscover her, it slowly became apparent that she had been a key but overlooked figure in the invention of the computer.

In Ada's Algorithm, James Essinger makes the case that the computer age could have started two centuries ago if Lovelace’s contemporaries had recognized her research and fully grasped its implications.

It’s a remarkable tale, starting with the outrageous behavior of her father, which made Ada instantly famous upon birth. Ada would go on to overcome numerous obstacles to obtain a level of education typically forbidden to women of her day. She would eventually join forces with Charles Babbage, generally credited with inventing the computer, although as Essinger makes clear, Babbage couldn’t have done it without Lovelace. Indeed, Lovelace wrote what is today considered the world’s first computer program—despite opposition that the principles of science were “beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.�

Based on ten years of research and filled with fascinating characters and observations of the period, not to mention numerous illustrations, Essinger tells Ada’s fascinating story in unprecedented detail to absorbing and inspiring effect.

An upcoming book:
Release date: August 4, 2015

Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L Currier

Synopsis:

Human life has been repeatedly transformed by certain key technologies, each of which has triggered a profound metamorphosis in human life. The fabrication of weapons, the mastery of fire, and the technologies of clothing and shelter transformed the human body, enabling us to walk upright, shed our body hair, and migrate out of tropical Africa into temperate climates. Symbolic communication changed human evolution from a slow biological process into a fast cultural process. Food production transformed the relationship between humanity and the environment, and with technologies of interaction led to the birth of civilization. Precision machinery, developed to build accurate clocks, spawned the industrial revolution and the rise of nation-states; and in the next metamorphosis, the rise of digital technologies may well lead to the birth of a global civilization.

Synthesizing the findings of primatology, paleontology, archeology, history, and anthropology, Richard Currier reinterprets and retells the modern narrative of human evolution that began with the discovery of Lucy and other Australopithecus fossils. But the same forces that allowed us to integrate technology into every aspect of our daily lives have also brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe. Unbound explains both how we got here and how human society must be transformed again to achieve a sustainable future.

Bryan wrote: "Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

Synopsis:

This i..."

Rushkoff's book is excellent in describing how technology has undermined narrative, which is how he defines the time of now. It's a wonderful companion for Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which explores our tendency to develop mental references that allow us to quickly put phenomena into a context, and the slower more difficult thinking in striving for a deeper understanding.

As Kahneman points out, if you're facing a Siberian tiger that hasn't eaten for a week, thinking fast is a good thing. However, there are times where thinking slow is called for, such as deciding which candidate is best suited to fulfill the challenge posed by a public office.

As Rushkoff points out, the deterioration of the narrative, which gives us the context to be more thoughtful, may explain why we think the way we do in the age of the Internet.

by Daniel Kahneman

by Marshall McLuhan

For my money, there is no book I consult more frequently when contemplating the media than Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, if for no other reason he anticipates the Internet and puts the electronic and print media in a context where new media consume legacy.

Of course, it's easy to see in considering how oral communications were consumed by the alphabet and the earliest forms of print, including cuneiform tablets, then papyrus, and ultimately the printing press.

On the other side of the coin, the development of electronic dawns with the telegraph, which is consumed by the telephone, radio, which to a large degree is consumed by TV, and of course all of the electronic consume print. In my lifetime p.m. newspapers have been driven into extinction by TV, which itself is threatened by the Internet (take note of the recent announcements that CBS and HBO will stream their content).

The most important development in electronic media's consumption of print is control. The guy who owned the printing press owned the delivery of the content and hence the message. But that changed with the telegraph. It was the guy with the dinero who largely controlled delivery and the content.

That control has only increased with the emergence of the electronic media, culminating in the Internet and its fundamental shift to a pull model.

In contrast to print, where the guy who ownMarshall McLuhans the printing press pushes the media out to an audience, the Internet allows those at the end of an electronic network to pull information off of it. If more suits at newspapers understood this, they might have better responded to the challenges and threats posed by the Internet.

I will have to look at this book, Martin. I agree, the Internet has put stronger "valves" of control to content. You see it in many ways from a local library magazine/journal database to political censorship.

Just finished The Innovators by Walter Isaacson. It's a well organized and fascinating look at the people who pioneered the hardware and software that made modern computing and digital networking possible. From Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 19th century, to some amazing advances as early as the 1930s, to the online communities we take for granted every time we post a review here on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, the human stories are as interesting as the tech they were working on.

One of Isaacson's themes is the importance of collaboration and teamwork rather than the sole genius. We see that theme again and again in this book.

It was also interesting to see how many of the computer geeks came from the Midwest. With just a few exceptions, they were from places like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois. If Stanford University hadn't been so friendly to young entrepreneurs, maybe some of them would have stayed in their home states and kept the rust belt economy from being quite so rusty. But the Stanford attitude compared to the attitude of other major universities is another part of what made the digital marketplace possible, and that another element of fascination to the story.

There's history and science in this book spanning generations, each generation building on the work of the previous one. And in spite of all the jokes, Al Gore really did have a role to play in helping to make the internet possible - championing legislation that made collaboration and research more realistic.

You'll know some of these stories already. You'll perhaps learn the truth behind the stories you thought you knew, and you'll probably meet some new people you hadn't heard of before. The book is a great blend of science, history and storytelling.

by Walter Isaacson

Thank you Dave - excellent review

by James Gleick

This book rightfully caused a stir when it was published two years ago. It is still worth a read.

The Information is extraordinary for its universal breadth and depth, especially notable for a survey of the Information Age, its roots, growth, and fruition. In the words of Seth Lloyd: "To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information." And that is what Gleick quite successfully sets out to do: specify what the Information Age is all about.

Where others - McLuhan say - offer their own insights, Gleick integrates the findings of philosophers, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, engineers, explorers, authors, and those who have implemented information technologies over the millennia into the mandala of his text. Despite this comprehensiveness and a dash of math, The Information is well within the grasp of a thoughtful general readership.

Information development and proliferation is examined from two necessary perspectives: mechanical and meaning, the yin and yang of communications. Mechanical covers how information is conveyed including physics governing the origination, transmission, and duplication at the receiving end. For those familiar with Claude Shannon's work, Gleick gives much play to the work of the father of Information theory, including the link with meaning - the recognition that the degree of uncertainty heightens the value of the information.

It seems to me - and this is the reader speaking not to be confused with Gleick or any of his sources - that when applied to meaning, that understanding how uncertainty affects information can go a long way to explaining how misinformation can be so widely circulated during the information age. On the one hand, many people are uncomfortable with the tsunami of information that defines our time, and they seek out the newest (most uncertain) information that supports the maintenance of their comfort zones. Hence it's possible for organizations such as Fox and its phalanx of seemingly insane commentators to continually replicate information with a high degree of uncertainty that can be perpetuated endlessly and without being devalued. Refuting it only increases misinformation's uncertainty and high value. The same principal obviously applies at least to a degree to many religions, propaganda, and information promoting a point of view or an agenda.

The chapters delving into meaning, including the fantastic Into the Meme Pool, will have the widest appeal to general readers such as myself. Gleick immediately introduces us to the proposition offered by the Frenchman Jacques Monod that above the biosphere is an "abstract kingdom" of ideas, which are re cognized as replicating, living organisms: "they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role." It should be added that information technology itself guides, sometimes controls, but is never absent from that selection process.

Gleick also gives generous play to the works of Douglas Hofstadter and Richard Dawkins in this adventuresome exploration of organic thoughts.

When it comes to regarding the flood of information that typifies the Information Age, Gleick offers two defenses against being overwhelmed: search and filter. As someone who makes his living figuratively chopping wood and hauling water in the Information Age, I can't argue with that sparse comfort.

But my heart soars like a hawk when Gleick invokes Lewis Mumford: "Unfortunately, information retrieving, however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one's own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature."

Ultimately, Gleick invokes Marshall McLuhan: "'we have extended our central nervous systems in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.'"

Books with thought and insight at their heart are a great reward for me, and The Information is a most rewarding read.

by Daniel J. Boorstin

If much of what passes as news today strikes you as contrived, then this likely is the book for you. Although it was first published in 1962, it remains most relevant today as Boorstin's revelations are still at play half a century after he brought them to our attention, even after the newspaper industry has largely become an anachronism, as even TV news has fallen by the wayside, and even more so as digital media flood every cranny on Spaceship Earth.

"In the twentieth century...we expect the papers to be full of news," Boorstin notes early on in the text. And, according to Boorstin, therein lies the root of the media's evil: it has to meet the bottomless pit of our demand for news, which helps explain why a local TV station in Washington this week devoted extensive air time to a 10-year-old kid who aspires to be a food writer and sponsored a grilled cheese sandwich tasting event at his home.

The electronic media had not driven a stake through the heart of newspapers, although p.m. papers were being trimmed by TV and radio when Boorstin first published The Image. But the emergence of electronic media has accelerated the trend of producing contrived news to meet the public's insatiable demand.

The pressure to create images of news events has resulted in the emergence of celebrity, Boorstin notes. We see that throughout the day with celebrities offering opinions on things of which they know little or noting, washed up movie stars hawking insurance to the elderly, and movie actors testifying in front of Congress. We have singing and dancing contests to birth the next celebrities in litters with a gestation period corresponding to the TV viewing season.

But where I think Boorstin missed the mark was in thinking that celebrity would supersede the hero. The hero - with an annual extravaganza on CNN, hosted by their star hard news reporter, has adopted quite nicely to the demand for heroes, whether on the battlefield, the home, or the playing field, by fastening on the cape of celebrity.

The ideals of American have been overshadowed by the contrivance of images of America that do not consider the consequences of their creation, according to Boorstin. No where have we proven this more than in our accumulation of wealth and consumption, which is contrived as a virtue.

The downside to the age of contrived images, Boorstin concludes, is that it belittles all that it attempts to exalt.

This is still an eye popping read. And, at less than 300 pages, it won't tear you away from the blogs on the Internet, or Twitter news' 150-character packets, for too long.

Thank you Martin

Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present

by Thomas J. Misa (no photo)

Synopsis:

Historian Thomas J. Misa’s sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. Spanning the preindustrial past, the age of scientific, political, and industrial revolutions, as well as the more recent eras of imperialism, modernism, and global security, this compelling work evaluates what Misa calls "the question of technology."

Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by examining how today's unsustainable energy systems, insecure information networks, and vulnerable global shipping have helped foster geopolitical risks and instability. A masterful analysis of how technology and culture have influenced each other over five centuries, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects faced by our technology-dependent world

Thanks Jerome

An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology

by Ian McNeil (no photo)

Synopsis:

Available for the first time in paperback, this volume includes twenty-two chapters by international experts covering the entire history of technology from humankind's earliest use of stone tools to the exploration of space. Written clearly and without unnecessary jargon, each chapter traces the development of its subject from earliest times to the present day, stressing the social context and its place in scientific thought.
* Usefully drawn with over 150 tables, drawings and photographs
* Two comprehensive indexes of names and subjects
* Essential reading for teachers and students in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Industrial History and Archaeology.

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Trans (Complete in One Volume)

by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (no photo)

Synopsis:

The first fully-documented historical analysis of the impact of the invention of printing upon European culture, and its importance as an agent of religious, political, social, scientific, and intellectual change.

Originally published in two volumes in 1980, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science.

Preface to Plato

by Eric Alfred Havelock

Synopsis:

Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.

The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.

The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science

How does this book relate to the Future of Media?

According to Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin - "The Greeks matter because some of them, at least, recognized that they were passing through a change in how people frame the world. In their case, it was the change from the oral to the written, and this is of course the subject of one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus. In it, Socrates declares himself fully aware that human capacities can change, and that as memory is displaced or funnelled into print, a variety of changes may set in which affect not only how we know things, but also who we are as human beings.

Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato shows that the Greeks were aware that there was some connection, perhaps even an all-embracing connection, among forms of communication, memory and thought. It’s quite fascinating to me that people should have this awareness of a sea change in their way of knowing, this self-consciousness about it." -- Journalism Professor at Columbia University - Todd Gitlin in interview with Five Books

More:

The Creation Of The Media: Political Origins Of Modern Communications

by Paul Starr (no photo)

Synopsis:

America's leading role in today's information revolution may seem simply to reflect its position as the world's dominant economy and most powerful state.

But by the early nineteenth century, when the United States was neither a world power nor a primary center of scientific discovery, it was already a leader in communications-in postal service and newspaper publishing, then in development of the telegraph and telephone networks, later in the whole repertoire of mass communications.

In this wide-ranging social history of American media, from the first printing press to the early days of radio, Paul Starr shows that the creation of modern communications was as much the result of political choices as of technological invention.

With his original historical analysis, Starr examines how the decisions that led to a state-run post office and private monopolies on the telegraph and telephone systems affected a developing society.

He illuminates contemporary controversies over freedom of information by exploring such crucial formative issues as freedom of the press, intellectual property, privacy, public access to information, and the shaping of specific technologies and institutions.

America's critical choices in these areas, Starr argues, affect the long-run path of development in a society and have had wide social, economic, and even military ramifications.

The Creation of the Media not only tells the history of the media in a new way; it puts America and its global influence into a new perspective.

Bentley wrote: "The Creation Of The Media: Political Origins Of Modern Communications

by Paul Starr (no pho..."
Great book, I read it several years ago.

Thank you Stuart / keep your posts coming - it helps all of our members when input is given from those who have read the books.