Faithful readers know of my geeky love of tech policy books [here are my “best of” lists for 2008 & 2009], and the intriguing battle taking place today between Internet optimists and pessimists in particular. One of the things that I noticed when I was putting together my compendium, “The Digital Decade’s Definitive Reading List: Internet & Info-Tech Policy Books of the 2000s,” is that there are up years and down years. For example, there weren’t a lot of big tech policy titles in 2000 or 2005. By contrast, 2001, 2006 and 2008 were monster years. I suppose that’s the case with any genre, of course.
Anyway, I was beginning to think that 2010 was shaping up to be one of those slow years, with Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget being the only major release so far this year. [See my review of it here.] But there are some very important titles on the way that are worth picking up. I’ve already pre-ordered most of these and am looking forward to reviewing them all soon:
- Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski and Jonathan Zittrain (eds.) – Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (now out)
- Nick Carr – The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (June)
- Clay Shirky – Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (June)
- Tim Wu – The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (November)
- Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything
- Evgeny Morozov — How Dictators Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web
Please let me know others that I may be missing. [Note: Most of the books I’ve been reading this year have more to do with the future of media, the press, journalism, etc. It’s been a big year for books like that. For example, McChesney & Nichols’ The Death and Life of American Journalism; Lee Bollinger’s Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century; and Bob Garfield’s The Chaos Scenario. But it’s not clear any of these books belong in the “info-tech policy” genre, although they all have something to say about the impact of the Internet and digital technology on the media and journalism. So, who knows, maybe I will add them to my end of year list.]
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.