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Friday, October 17, 2014

Jay's Book Choice

For my books, I was primarily interested in how the new technologies are shaping the economy & political participation of the information society. In my search, I came across three books that I found intriguing:

http://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393239357/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413507327&sr=1-1&keywords=technology

This bestseller looks at how automation is going to affect how people work in our new knowledge-driven economy. Despite being a #1 seller on Amazon (in the "Business" category), I gave it a pass since critic reviews described the thinking as rather simplistic, and doing little to further the conversation.


http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Amateur-MySpace-user-generated-destroying/dp/0385520816/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413570269&sr=1-8&keywords=Youtube

I found this book intriguing since the author seemed extremely vitrolic about his opinions. Essentially, he believes that Myspace/Youtoube/Facebook are going to destroy our society, as personality-centric amateur media overtakes content-centric professional media. The author believes that this societal shift will lead to a degeneration & eventual collapse of our society. While his stance is interesting, I gave this one a pass as well.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Place-Hide-Snowden-Surveillance/dp/162779073X/ref=sr_1_67?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413571524&sr=1-67&keywords=politics

This book explain how the United States government is cataloging the actions of it's citizens without their consent. Critics claim that it has little insight into new NSA activities, but goes over general US government & media surveillance tactics quite well. I know little about this topic, and found it quite interesting, so this is the book I have chosen. Hopefully it will provide insight into how the government is conducting it's actions within our information society.

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