Running the risk of being the last one to tell you, I must be sure you notice an article from a couple of weeks ago in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik: The Information. The article follows a theme I've noticed and commented on here for several months now: the spate of new books about the good, the bad and the ugly about the Information Revolution.
Gopnik shelves the new books into three different different sections:
Never-Betters, better-Nevers and the Ever-Wasers. Huh?
The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. [more]
Gopnik has done an amazing job collecting and the revelant titles and authors and this is article is a "must read" summary of these three important threads of thought --So go read it alreaday!
