As I have become more accustomed to using computers for a lot of things, my mind has sometimes wonder is there a different way of doing the said things? What if I can remove computer from the equation, will the resulting thing be better or worse? Or it won’t matter. So in last few months I’ve started reading literature which goes against the grain and states why the IT revolution isn’t a silver bullet. This book is the latest in the series, and rightly gives a lot of ideas to think through. Is being connected always necessary, is looking into the screen really so interesting that you’d prefer it instead of things and people around you? Is this just a phase or something more sinister is at play here? Are we really developing internet brains – hyper-connected, shallow, impulsive, and distracted? Read it and find it for yourself.
I’d reduce 0.5 star because there are entire chapters which you can skip without getting out of them. These are mostly present to present historical perspective, but are pretty long.
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Working in IT industry and writing software tends to generate such feelings, especially when one considers the perpetual broken state of most of our software, and the fact that these are designed and created by individuals who (unknowingly) hold some biases, and have flaws and weaknesses in their reasoning. This isn’t true or false for some, but is true for everyone. So I guess whatever way we try to use the internet, and the web, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.