Review

Great history, best book I’ve read on the tech industry so far.

I would recommend this book to somebody in the government (or in the developing world) trying to understand how Silicon Valley works. It does well as an entertaining history of why companies like Facebook have grown so fast, but tends towards over-exuberant and over-generalized proclamations about what leads to success in technology. As another reviewer stated, this book doesn’t provide much beyond typical Fast Company articles.

The book is split up into two parts. The first part on robot toys is worthless, the second on new forms of communication is merely bad. I would recommend reading the concluding chapter, and skipping the rest. I think there are a let of legitimate arguments to be made about the pernicious effects of new communications media, but Turkle seems to miss the boat entirely, instead focusing on a few extreme examples and spending most of the book complaining about how it would be better if we could just spend more time with one-another. ...

The best book I’ve read so far about society-level changes that are happening due to internet technology. That would be higher praise if I had read more books, but so far I’ve only covered The New Digital Age and Alone Together, both of which were bad. The conclusion about the pernicious nature of siren servers (Facebook, Google, Napster, Hedge Funds, Wall Mart etc.) controlling our information and shrinking the economy is not entirely convincing. Lanier’s siren servers seem more different than alike, but even the author admits, when all you have is a hammer… ...

This book was short! Very informative, the information about gender and phone usage was very helpful, but the link between anecdotal stories and the broader picture didn’t quite connect for me. I wish the book were 2-3x as long. I think Smart Mobs, a book referenced in the Great Indian Phone Book, is still a better primer on the subject, even though it does not focus on India.

Somewhat showing its age, Many ideas that may have been fresh when he wrote it, especially on the limitations of science and meditation when dealing with those classified as having disorders, are no longer unique. The entire book is purely anecdotes and pseudo-spiritual-speculation, which was fine because the author was very aware of the limits of our knowledge on issues of the mind.

Just as wide reaching as guns germs and steel, but better. Unfortunate stereotypical views towards China and the Middle East, and the book could also use fewer tangents, but well worth the long read.

Uneven. Beginning chapters were good, the Target data mining section was interesting, and the appendix was useful, but the remaining 70 percent was the author defining habit very broadly and going in depth on useless anecdotes.

short. useful.

Not recommended. It is a mediocre theory that seriously overfit data from the mid-90’s and has led to some really problematic ideas and policies since. For a much more nuanced perspective on the role of civilizations on the current state of global affairs, try World 3.0 by Pankaj Ghemawat.