Discontinuing This Domain...

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Book Review: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

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How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell My rating: 2 of 5 stars You can sum up this book in a tweet: Put down the phone; turn off the computer. Pay attention to the physical (nature, people, and in her case - birds) all around you, right there in your own backyard. Accomplishing this requires a significant application of discipline, a point that she mentions but spends too little time exploring. I felt there were too many tangents that strayed away from the point: resisting the attention economy. View all my reviews
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Book Review: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

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The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed this book. We tend to glorify the big names: Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg -- but this book includes the people that worked with them and that sometimes provided more value! I liked the parts stressing how the computer should augment human abilities rather than replace humans. I joined the bandwagon in the early 80s and thought the computer would unleash a creative storm, and ultimately make us smarter. I was only partly right. The book was written in 2014, so it's a bit dated in one respect. He thought social media would connect people, create community. He was right to an extent of course, but I think he didn't foresee how much our data would be used to market to us, to manipulate us, and in a political / cultural sense -- separate us. I find it unfortunate that the original idea of computing and the internet (discussed nicely in
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