By: DESMOND LATHAM, BusinessDay: AN interesting hardcover arrived on my desk recently: 50 Digital Ideas You Really Need to Know. The irony is most books about the internet are not hardcovers. Perhaps it’s something to do with the concept of digital being flighty. The fact that Tom Chatfield and his publisher went with the hardcover partly explains why this book is slightly different from other attempts at putting thoughts about the internet and digital concepts down on paper. He has published a whip around the present and future of digital ideas. He starts with a bog-standard explanation of what the internet is, and why it’s not the web. Many confuse the two. The internet pre-dates the "world wide web" and is a mass of cables linking machines. The web is just one of the number of services that use the internet. But he goes much further than just talking about jargon. This is a book about ideas — from augmented reality, which is one of the new big things, to distraction, which is merely another word for what Alvin Toffler called future shock: too much information going on simultaneously and humans becoming mentally saturated. The book features psychology and technology, and demythologises various sectors. Each concept gets a couple of pages and a tagged note with more explanations. It actually works like a website, if that makes any sense. And that’s what is quite interesting about the format Chatfield uses. The publisher must believe the concepts contained within are likely to persist for some time, just like a hardcover book should. The publisher has also decided to colour the book brown, which as we all know is the colour of solid reliability and consistency. That is why UPS uses brown on its vans. The 50 ideas include virtual goods, the inevitable cloud computing, and convergence — which sees various technologies, well, converging. He looks at phrases used by the digital community such as "going viral" and "culture jamming". Read Full: BusinessDay - BOOK REVIEW: 50 Digital Ideas You Really Need to Know
Saturday, 24 December 2011
BOOK REVIEW: 50 Digital Ideas You Really Need to Know
By: DESMOND LATHAM, BusinessDay: AN interesting hardcover arrived on my desk recently: 50 Digital Ideas You Really Need to Know. The irony is most books about the internet are not hardcovers. Perhaps it’s something to do with the concept of digital being flighty. The fact that Tom Chatfield and his publisher went with the hardcover partly explains why this book is slightly different from other attempts at putting thoughts about the internet and digital concepts down on paper. He has published a whip around the present and future of digital ideas. He starts with a bog-standard explanation of what the internet is, and why it’s not the web. Many confuse the two. The internet pre-dates the "world wide web" and is a mass of cables linking machines. The web is just one of the number of services that use the internet. But he goes much further than just talking about jargon. This is a book about ideas — from augmented reality, which is one of the new big things, to distraction, which is merely another word for what Alvin Toffler called future shock: too much information going on simultaneously and humans becoming mentally saturated. The book features psychology and technology, and demythologises various sectors. Each concept gets a couple of pages and a tagged note with more explanations. It actually works like a website, if that makes any sense. And that’s what is quite interesting about the format Chatfield uses. The publisher must believe the concepts contained within are likely to persist for some time, just like a hardcover book should. The publisher has also decided to colour the book brown, which as we all know is the colour of solid reliability and consistency. That is why UPS uses brown on its vans. The 50 ideas include virtual goods, the inevitable cloud computing, and convergence — which sees various technologies, well, converging. He looks at phrases used by the digital community such as "going viral" and "culture jamming". Read Full: BusinessDay - BOOK REVIEW: 50 Digital Ideas You Really Need to Know