NET RESULTS:IF YOU are thinking about books for someone in your life who enjoys technology, or are looking for a good read yourself, the past year offered up a number of great choices. Some of these will be easily found in a good bookshop – for example, James Gleick – and, of course, Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs can be found just about everywhere (and looks to be the top-selling book of the year on Amazon as well).
Some of the others may require special ordering, either online or from your local bookshop. Don’t forget that your nearby bricks-and-mortar shop will almost always be happy to put in special orders.
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
By James Gleick
A recent visitor to these shores to speak at TCD’s Science Gallery, Gleick is one of the best writers on big ideas in science and technology. In this latest book, he takes on the entire history of information – how humans began without any system for permanently recording thoughts and ideas and then invented ever more complex ways of doing so. So what happens now that we live in an age of information glut? A fascinating and thoughtful book.
Steve Jobs
By Walter Isaacson
A must-read for anybody interested in technology – or design, or electronics, or entrepreneurship, or the music industry, or the film industry, or computer animation ... Jobs shaped so many of these industries and was one of the most fascinating, challenging, and complicated personalities in the technology – or any other – sector. This fast-paced biography on the late, great Jobs will appeal to a huge range of readers (my mother loved it).
How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
By Steven Levy
Levy has tackled a broad range of tech topics and always makes them intriguing. This time around, he goes after Google, the little upstart startup that has become one of the most powerful and operationally opaque technology juggernauts, incredibly creative and inspiring, and worrying in equal measure.
The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
By Evgeny Morozov
If you think the revolution will be tweeted, read Morozov’s book for a contrarian view. Social media helped bring together protesters in Egypt, but the same technologies are also used by repressive regimes to suppress and stifle, he says. Certainly, the London riots last summer give a fresh perspective on his argument that technologies can be used for better or for worse, for good or for bad. In short, technologies don’t have a morality – and internet freedom may end up being used in nefarious ways.
Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
By Clay Shirky
On the other hand, maybe technology isn’t so bad. Shirky, another academic (his home base is New York University) is an excellent writer and speaker, particularly good at analysing social media and social trends. In this book, released in paperback this year, he argues that digital technologies are going to release an outpouring of collaborative creativity.
The Winter of Our Disconnect
By Susan Maushart
When the author, an American mother living in Sydney with a household of digitally addicted teenagers, decides to unplug everyone from anything with a screen for several months, the results are surprising. Thought-provoking and very funny, this is an enjoyable read regardless of whether you think you’ll ever personally disconnect for more than five minutes.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
By Nicholas Carr
A Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2011, The Shallowsis a provocative companion book to Maushart's. Carr loved using the net but began to grow increasingly concerned about whether having constant access to endless information is changing the way we communicate, function and think. This book dives into a wide variety of research and his conclusions seem to divide people as strongly as Marmite.
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
By Eli Pariser
The former executive director of US political organisation MoveOn.org, Pariser pinpoints a worrying and hidden trend – the way in which many internet sites from Google to the Washington Postto Facebook increasingly filter the content they present to you. Does it matter whether what you see on Google when you search a term is different from what your friend sees? Or that if you are a political liberal, Facebook gives you only liberal leaning political links in your newsfeed? Pariser thinks so.
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
By Sherry Turkle
MIT professor Turkle is a leading academic writer on technology and its social and cultural impacts. A celebrant at the altar of tech back in the 90s, Turkle offers here a provocative about-face in which she questions whether technology is becoming a corrosive element in society.
Turn Left at Orion
By Guy Consolmagno et al.
This classic guide to stargazing, and using a telescope or space binoculars, was reissued this year in a very handy, spiral-bound paperback format that makes it much easier to use outside in the dark as it will lie flat at a selected page. The book gives you 100 objects to find in the night sky, from the very easy to the challenging. If you are buying a telescope to put under the tree, make sure this book is wrapped alongside it.
