Paradox2140: Progress:Information Overload:Google
Explore the Paradox2140 curated reading list on information overload and progress. Discover key insights from Against the Machine by Lee Siegel and The Google Story by David A. Vise, examining how Google and the digital age shape society, business, and the pursuit of knowledge.
Book
The Google Story (2018 Updated Edition)
by David A. Vise
The definitive, bestselling account of the company that changed the way we work and live, updated for the twentieth anniversary of Google’s founding with analysis of its most recent bold moves to redefine the world—and its even more ambitious plans for the future. Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, as they said, “change the world” through a powerful search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free. The Google Story takes you deep inside the company’s wild ride from an idea that struggled for funding in 1998 to a firm that today rakes in billions in profits. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, this fast-moving narrative reveals how an unorthodox management style and a culture of innovation enabled a search-engine giant to shake up Madison Avenue, clash with governments that accuse it of being a monopoly, deploy self-driving cars to forever change how we travel, and launch high-flying Internet balloons. Unafraid of controversy, Google is surging ahead with artificial intelligence that could cure diseases but also displace millions of people from their jobs, testing the founders’ guiding mantra: DON’T BE EVIL. Praise for The Google Story “[The authors] do a fine job of recounting Google’s rapid rise and explaining its search business.”—The New York Times “An intriguing insider view of the Google culture.”—Harvard Business Review “An interesting read on a powerhouse company . . . If you haven’t read anything about one of today’s most influential companies, you should. If you don’t read The Google Story, you’re missing a few extra treats.”—USA Today “Fascinating . . . meticulous . . . never bogs down.”—Houston Chronicle
Book
Against the Machine
by Lee Siegel
From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet. Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity. Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.
Book
What Would Google Do?: Reverse Engineering Business Strategies for Survival and Success in the Internet Era
by Jarvis, Jeff
No summary available.
Book
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning)
by Jenkins, Henry
No summary available.
Book
Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe
by Imre, Aniko
No summary available.
