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This book would have been a decent read ten years ago. Nothing dates faster than tech books.
Memo to corporate — if you read just one paragraph in this book, make it this one:"It’s not enough to sit idly by, ignoring and quieting the employee inside your company who doesn’t buy CDs anymore, or canceled her cable television, or started playing video games instead of reading a book, or stopped buying the print edition of the newspaper. These people are trying to tell you about the future and how it works. It’s up to you to listen."
I think I would have liked this book better if it offered me new information, but I am of his generation, already speaking his language. His book is persuasive to a generation older than me, with my iPhone streaming a personalized Reader feed full of news. But if I handed this book to someone who was a little older than me and prone to Luddite-ness, I think it would definitely have value. I liked his letter to the media dinosaurs at the end. Because he's right, things will never look backward, o...
The author, a technology reporter for the New York Times, shows the ways in which media have changed due to technology and how in turn this change shapes consumers’ expectations of how media are consumed. He argues against the Luddite claims that short-form, rapid-fire media “bytes” are destroying our brains (though he allows that our brains are changing due to how we use technology). He also argues that despite the radical nature of recent change, and the ability to acquire vast amounts of spec...
In the middle of reading this now on my Kindle app, so far it's excellent.
It's the apocalypse! No. Not really. As anyone with some knowledge of history knows, significant technological change leads to fear and loathing. So we aren't alone in trying to figure out how it works, or will work.I like that Bilton doesn't take the subject matter too seriously. Social media gurus spend enough time doing that. Though he does fall prey to some business-speak now and again which detracts from his mostly accessible writing style.He covers the porn industry as leading-edge innovat...
3.5: This was an assigned reading for my MLIS program but I didn't mind it. It's a bit dated (2010) so some of the tech references and various details are not connected to present reality. However, there were several times the author speculated on the future of things in the information world and he was spot on. His identification of influencers and their sway over trends was especially impressive!
This book challenged me to rethink my rules about the use of cellphones and ipods during class. I am trying to be less legalistic. So far most students are fine. As in most of life, the few who are not able to handle the freedom will ruin it for the rest of us. I would say no more than a dozen students are unable to monitor their own use of the devices. That leaves 138 who are able to focus on classwork with only minimal electronic device usage. Nick Bilton makes a nice case for the awesomeness
Possibly better if read as a soapbox rant, or fiction rather than non-fiction. The author tries to make a case about some things and cites a lot of research, but, while he’s honest enough to list the counter-points, he hand-waves almost all of them as not applicable or wrong (without any support for that position), and touts the points from the studies that he does agree with--again, often without offering any more than his opinion that it’s correct.Granted, he does collect a lot of studies abou...
My initial review of this title in December 2010 was unkind and perhaps even unfair to the author. Since that time I have spent a great deal more time becoming involved with online media and social networking, and I'm not completely sure he isn't right in some major ways. Now, in April 2011, the below more closely reflects my current thinking. Years ago I read a book by Jeff Gomez called Print is Dead. Gomez electrified me by writing something we know but may have never articulated: (to paraphra...
Maybe I read too many books like this, but this one didn't bring anything new to the table.Ch. 1 - Porn has always adapted to new technologies.Ch. 2 - The printing press, radio, and tv also changed the culture.ch. 3, 4 - digital natives dont consume news and entertainment like we do.ch. 5, 7 - is mulititasking bad or just different?ch. 6 - social networkingCh. 8 - yep. it's changed alright.If any of this seems new, this one is probably for you. If not, you could have probably written this book y...
This book was written in 2010, and holds up moderately well.
I usually loathe books like these, but this one was pretty decent. As in all tales of changing paradigms, I’d rather that my superiors had read this than me. For all the back cover's smugness about incorporating new technologies, I thought the QR code implementation didn’t go far enough in enhancing the reading experience. On the other hand, Bilton speaks very clearly to the need for content providers to:1. Make it easy-as-pie for customers to obtain content in whatever form they want it. (In ot...
In many of my adult computer classes I often find myself having to explain why technology is so important in our daily lives and why it is going to continue to be important as time goes on. I have many students who argue against this, saying that the computer is only a tool for Facebook and they want to have real human interactions with real people. Basically, they say that the computer is bad news, and don’t want or need to use it.In his book, ‘I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works’, Nic...