Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
It’s time again to look back at the major cyberlaw and information tech policy books of the year. I’ve decided to drop the top 10 list approach I’ve used in past years (see 2008, 2009, 2010) and just use a more thematic listing of major titles released in 2011. This thematic approach gets me out [...]
Information overload is a hot topic these days. I’ve really enjoyed recent essays by Aaron Saenz (“Are We Too Plugged In? Distracted vs. Enhanced Minds”), Michael Sacasas (“Technology Sabbaths and Other Strategies for the Digitized World“), and Peggy Noonan (“Information Overload is Nothing New“) discussing this concern in a thoughtful way. Thoughtful discussion about this issue [...]
I’ve noted here before that Gordon Crovitz is my favorite technology policy columnist and that everything he pens for his “Information Age” column for The Wall Street Journal is well worth reading. His latest might be his best ever. It touches upon the great debate between Internet optimists and pessimists regarding the impact of digital [...]
Michiko Kakutani has a very interesting essay in the New York Times entitled, “Texts Without Contexts,” which does a nice job running through the differences between Internet optimists and pessimists, a topic I’ve spent a great deal of time writing about here. (See: “Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over Technology’s [...]
I just finished Ken Auletta’s latest book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, and I highly recommend it. Auletta is an amazingly gifted journalist and knows how put together a hell of good story. It helps in this case that he was granted unprecedented access to the Google team and their [...]
I very much enjoyed Dennis Baron’s new book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, and highly recommend you pick it up. Baron does a wonderful job exploring the history of techno-pessimism and the endless battles about the impact of new technologies on life and learning, something I have written about here before [...]
Interesting piece from Jeff Jarvis about “Google Bigotry,” or his belief that “media people are going after Google’s success for no good reason other than their own jealousy.” Jarvis argues that reporters penning hard-nosed stories about Google are, in reality, just a bunch of envious cry-babies: newspaper people will use their last drops of ink [...]
My problem with what Nick Carr is saying about Wikipedia here — as well as in his book The Big Switch – is that he always seems to assume that Wikipedia constitutes the totality of most searches for information online. I suppose it does for some people, but I have a hard time accepting the [...]
It’s been a big year for tech policy books. Several important titles were released in 2008 that offer interesting perspectives about the future of the Internet and the impact digital technologies are having on our lives, culture, and economy. Back in September, I compared some of the most popular technology policy books of the past [...]
Somewhere between Nick Carr’s “Typology of Network Strategies” and Chris Anderson’s “Four Kinds of Free” is the secret to understanding our new economy: Carr’s “Typology of Network Strategies”: Network effect Data mining Digital sharecropping, or “user-generated content” Complements Two-sided markets Economies of scale, economies of scope, and experience Anderson’s “Four Kinds of Free”: Direct cross-subsidy [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
