I recently finished Tyler Cowen’s latest book, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Like everything he writes, this book is worth reading and it will be of interest to those who follow technology policy debates since Cowen makes a passionate case for “Internet optimism” in the face of recent criticisms of the Internet and the Information Age in general.
Cowen is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the co-author, along with Alex Tabarrok, of the wonderful MarginalRevolution.com blog. And if you haven’t read Cowen’s
In Praise of Commercial Culture, stop what you’re doing and go get yourself a copy right now. Brilliant book. Compared to that book, Create Your Own Economy is a difficult book to summarize. Seriously, this book is all over the place… but in a good way. Even though it sometimes feels like “Tyler’s Miscellaneous Ramblings,” those ramblings will keep you engaged and entertained. Cord Blomquist did a pretty good job of summarizing the general themes of the book in this post two months ago when he noted that, “despite cultural reflexes that would have us do otherwise, we should embrace… new technologies as means to be more selective about what information we absorb and therefore welcome the increased volume of bytes into our lives. In his new book, [Cowen] explores technology as a vehicle to help you determine what you really value, not a series of a email-powered torture devices.” That’s a pretty good summation, but the book is about much more than that.
Instead of a full-blown review, I want to focus on some of passages from Cowen’s book about coping with information overload, which I think readers here might find of interest. In doing so, I will contrast Cowen’s views with those of John Freeman, who just penned “A Manifesto for Slow Communication” in The Wall Street Journal. As we will see, Cowen and Freeman’s differences exemplify the heated ongoing debate taking place among “Internet optimists & pessimists,” which I have discussed here many times before. Continue reading →
I just finished reading through The Economist’s new 14-page special report on cloud computing, “Let It Rise” in which Ludwig Siegele provides an outstanding overview of cloud computing and why it is so important:
The rise of the cloud is more than just another platform shift that gets geeks excited. It will undoubtedly transform the information technology (IT) industry, but it will also profoundly change the way people work and companies operate. It will allow digital technology to penetrate every nook and cranny of the economy and of society, creating some tricky political problems along the way.
Even if you are very familiar with cloud computing, I recommend you take a look at the article. Anyway, while I was reading it, I was unsurprised to come across some comments from Nicholas Carr, whose new book
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is essentially an early history of cloud computing and an investigation into its effects on our economy, culture, and society. And that also reminded me that, even though I have mentioned Carr’s book here several times since it was released earlier this year, I have failed to give it a dedicated review. And it certain deserves one because “The Big Switch” is easily one of the most important technology policy books of 2008.
Continue reading →
[Note: I updated this discussion and chart in a subsequent essay. See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s Impact on Society.”]
A number of very interesting books have been released over the past year or two which debate how the Internet is reshaping our culture and the economy. I’ve reviewed a couple of them here but I have been waiting to compile a sort of mega-book review once I found a sensible way to conceptually group them together. I’m not going to have time to cover each of them here in the detail they deserve, but I think I have at least found a sensible way to categorize them. For lack of better descriptors, I’ve divided these books and thinkers into two camps: “Internet optimists” versus “Internet Pessimists.” Here’s a list of some of the individuals and books (or other articles and blogs) that I believe epitomize these two camps of thinking:
Adherents & Their Books / Writings
|
Internet Optimists
|
Internet Pessimists
|
|
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks
|
Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur
|
|
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!”
|
Lee Siegel, Against the Machine
|
|
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
|
Nick Carr, The Big Switch
|
|
Cass Sunstein, Infotopia
|
Cass Sunstein, Republic.com
|
|
Don Tapscott, Wikinomics
|
Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited
|
|
Kevin Kelly & Wired mag in general
|
Alex Iskold, “The Danger of Free”
|
|
Mike Masnick & TechDirt blog
|
Mark Cuban
|
And here’s a rough sketch of the major beliefs or key themes that separate these two schools of thinking about the impact of the Internet on our culture and economy:
Beliefs / Themes
|
Internet Optimists
|
Internet Pessimists
|
|
Culture / Social
|
|
Net is Participatory
|
Net is Polarizing
|
|
Net yields Personalization
|
Net yields Fragmentation
|
|
a “Global village”
|
Balkanization
|
|
Heterogeneity
/ Diversity of Thought
|
Homogeneity
/ Close-mindedness
|
|
Net breeds pro-democratic tendencies
|
Net breeds anti-democratic tendencies
|
|
Tool of liberation & empowerment
|
Tool of frequent misuse & abuse
|
|
|
|
Economics / Business
|
|
Benefits of “free”
(“Free” = future of media / business)
|
Costs of “free”
(“Free” = end of media / business)
|
|
Increasing importance of “Gift economy”
|
Continuing importance of property rights, profits, firms
|
|
“Wiki” model = wisdom of crowds; power of collective intelligence
|
“Wiki” model = stupidity of crowds; errors of collective intelligence
|
|
Mass collaboration
|
Individual effort
|
So, what to make of this intellectual war? Who’s got the story right?
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.