Authors: Robert McCormick Adams.
Hardcover, 360 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication Date: 1996-09-30


Reviews :

   

Technology, perhaps the most salient feature of our time, affects everything from jobs to international law yet ranks among the most unpredictable facets of human life. Here Robert McC. Adams, renowned anthropologist and Secretary Emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution, builds a new approach to understanding the circumstances that drive technological change, stressing its episodic, irregular nature. The result is nothing less than a sweeping history of technological transformation from ancient times until now. Rare in antiquity, the bursts of innovations that mark the advance of technology have gradually accelerated and now have become an almost continuous feature of our culture. Repeatedly shifting in direction, this path has been shaped by a host of interacting social, cultural, and scientific forces rather than any deterministic logic. Thus future technological developments, Adams maintains, are predictable only over the very short term.

Adams's account highlights Britain and the United States from early modern times onward. Locating the roots of the Industrial Revolution in British economic and social institutions, he goes on to consider the new forms of enterprise in which it was embodied and its loss of momentum in the later nineteenth century. He then turns to the early United States, whose path toward industrialization initially involved considerable "technology transfer" from Britain. Propelled by the advent of mass production, world industrial leadership passed to the United States around the end of the nineteenth century. Government-supported research and development, guided partly by military interests, helped secure this leadership.

Today, as Adams shows, we find ourselves in a profoundly changed era. The United States has led the way to a strikingly new multinational pattern of opportunity and risk, where technological primacy can no longer be credited to any single nation. This recent trend places even more responsibility on the state to establish policies that will keep markets open for its companies and make its industries more competitive. Adams concludes with an argument for active government support of science and technology research that should be read by anyone interested in America's ability to compete globally.

...

Authors: Joel Kotkin.
Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 2000-11-14
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    In the blink of an eye, vast economic forces have created new types of communities and reinvented old ones. In The New Geography, acclaimed forecaster Joel Kotkin decodes the changes, and provides the first clear road map for where Americans will live and work in the decades to come, and why. He examines the new role of cities in America and takes us into the new American neighborhood. The New Geography is a brilliant and indispensable guidebook to a fundamentally new landscape....

    There's a belief that the rise of technology will make cities obsolete, as more people live where they choose and telecommute to work. The advent of portable cell phones, easy air travel, and hotel time-sharing encourages a sense of "placelessness"--and that bodes ill for urban clusters. But Joel Kotkin thinks this conventional wisdom is unwise: "The importance of geography is not dwindling to nothing in the digital era; in fact, quite the opposite. In reality, place--geography--matters now more than ever before," he writes. Cities will no longer be industrial or corporate centers, but rather magnets for intelligence and talent in a way they haven't been for quite some time. The paradigm is an old one:

Like the postindustrial metropolis, the preindustrial city, existing before the era dominated by mass production of goods and services, flourished by capitalizing on functions--such as cross-cultural trades, the arts, and specialized craft-based production--that could not be adequately performed by the far more numerically superior hinterland.

In this sense, the future city may have more in common with Venice during the Renaissance than Detroit during the Henry Ford era.

Kotkin does not believe all cities will thrive in this environment. He's particularly down on what he calls the "midopolis"--suburbs built mainly in the 1950s and 1960s to service the old-city model. They are now afflicted by crumbling infrastructures, rising crime rates, and declining schools. He cites Long Island and the San Fernando Valley as examples. New forms of city--Kotkin calls then "nerdistans"--are already rising in their place. They are self-contained suburbs that have few of the problems associated with urban cores, and they attract companies and workers tuned into the technological revolution. He names Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina, as prototypes. Kotkin is a veteran business journalist who writes for The New York Times and other publications. He's written several other books, including Tribes, but The New Geography is his best yet: a smart combination of the reportage one expects from a top-drawer magazine article and the thoughtfulness one expects from a book. It may come to be remembered as a classic, an information-age groundbreaker with the influence of Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. --John J. Miller ...

Authors:
Kindle Edition, 404 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication Date: 2000-08-10


Reviews :

    This book makes the startling case that North Americans were getting on the "information highway" as early as the 1700's, and have been using it as a critical building block of their social, economic, and political world ever since.
By the time of the founding of the United States, there was a postal system and roads for the distribution of mail, copyright laws to protect intellectual property, and newspapers, books, and broadsides to bring information to a populace that was building a nation on the basis of an informed electorate. In the 19th century, Americans developed the telegraph, telephone, and motion pictures, inventions that further expanded the reach of information. In the 20th century they added television, computers, and the Internet, ultimately connecting themselves to a whole world of information.
From the beginning North Americans were willing to invest in the infrastructure to make such connectivity possible. This book explores what the deployment of these technologies says about American society. The editors assembled a group of contributors who are experts in their particular fields and worked with them to create a book that is fully integrated and cross-referenced....

    Does the Information Age predate computers? Does it, in fact, predate the Industrial Age? Though this thesis isn't explicitly examined in A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, the reader can't help but think about it throughout. Editors Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and James W. Cortada assembled a healthy mix of historians and management consultants to write the history of information services in America, and the very mild pro-business bias is more than balanced by the deeper insight into the companies and corporations that did much to spur technological change.

Fascinating nuggets of post-McLuhan media history lie within this sober analysis; it's startling to read of the antebellum U.S. Post Office refusing to deliver abolitionist materials to slave states, for example. These help to contextualize the information architecture we take for granted, as well as the innovations made possible by this architecture--imagine 50-story buildings without telephones. Though the editors profess no gift of prophecy for themselves or their authors, A Nation Transformed by Information will still give canny readers something to think about as they make their way through the Information Age. --Rob Lightner ...

Authors: John Marks Templeton.
Hardcover, 291 pages
Publisher: Templeton Foundation Press
Publication Date: 1997-10


Reviews :

    This book is a delightful documentation, a celebration, of the progress of humankind in the last century. In spite of the pessimism that prevails in the media, people are better fed, better clothed, better housed, and better educated than at any previous time. Generously illustrated with photographs, charts, and graphics that illustrate this perspective, the book takes a look at how good we have it now compared to in the past in such areas as: How We Live, Food, Health and Life Expectancy, Working Conditions, Technology, Political Freedom, Economic Freedom, Education, Information and Communications, Transportation, Leisure, The Environment, Getting Along, The Spirit....

Authors: Penley Constance.
Hardcover, 327 pages
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Publication Date: 1991-06

Authors: Jerry Mander.
Hardcover, 400 pages
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Publication Date: 1991-10


Reviews :

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Authors: Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Publication Date: 2001-02
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    People and organizations at every stage of Internet sophistication face the same burning question: How should they change in order to succeed in a digital world? Renowned thinker and business trailblazer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter says answers will be found not in cyberspace but on the ground, where real people connect, collaborate, and form thriving human communities. In this eye-opening book, Kanter explores what she calls "e-culture" - a new way of living and working that will transform every aspect of today's organizations. Kanter argues that networks of relationships, not just new technologies, permit speed and seamlessness, encourage creativity and collaboration, and release energy and brainpower - the "soul" of e-business. And every organization - from dotcoms to dotcom-enablers (technology and service providers) to wannadots (traditional companies struggling to embrace the Web) - must learn to build and foster them.Based on a landmark project with rare on-site access, over 300 interviews, and a 785-company global survey, "Evolve!" provides a hands-on blueprint for adopting the core principles of e-culture: treat strategy as improvisational theater; nurture networks of partners; reconstruct organizations as online and offline "communities"; and attract and retain top talent. With colorful and memorable stories, Kanter illuminates vast differences between older, more conservative companies and aggressive, born-digital dotcoms. She takes us deep inside evolving organizations - including IBM, eBay, Reuters, Sun Microsystems, Razorfish, Abuzz, Barnesandnoble.com, Williams-Sonoma, and pioneering public schools - to provide best practices from e-culture pacesetters and cautionary lessons from Internet laggards.Defining the skills leaders need to master change, she reveals how dotcoms and dotcom-enablers can grow fast while crafting a great culture, and how wannadots can benefit by becoming Web-enabled. For anyone who wants to realize the potential and avoid the pitfalls of the Internet age, this pathbreaking book identifies and analyzes the emergence of e-culture - and provides a lively, roll-up-your-sleeves guide to profiting from tomorrow. Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. She has been named one of the "50 Most Powerful Women in the World" by "The Times of London", and is the author of several bestselling books....

    Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Eartha Kitt of change-management gurus. Just when you think the grand dame has taken her final bow, she comes bounding back onto the scene with a new act that's as shrewd and insightful as anything any young kitten has to offer--but benefiting from decades of wisdom and experience that puts the whole litter to shame. Take, for instance, Evolve!, Kanter's latest in a string of highly influential books on organizational management (including Innovation, World Class, When Giants Learn to Dance, and The Change Masters). Yes, the ubiquitous dot (as in "com") after the E in "Evolve" on the book's cover may suggest to the cynical that this is another old-school change guru weighing in with the obligatory guide to making it on the Net--and months after e-commerce mania has subsided, to boot! And granted, the thumbnail keys to successful I-preneuring that form the book's structure--namely, a willingness to improvise, a desire to network aggressively with other sites, a readiness to create "integrated communities," and a commitment to creating a workplace culture that attracts and retains the best talent--aren't necessarily breakthrough insights, however cogently presented.

But Evolve! stands out among the vast spate of e-commerce how-tos of the past few years because of the meticulous, rigorous research on the part of Kanter and her legion of Harvard Business associates. Here, coupled with Kanter's always-keen prose, that research translates into perhaps the most vivid, probing, and instructive anthology of e-commerce success (and failure) stories yet to appear in one book. Kanter & Co. conducted over 300 interviews, plus surveys with nearly three times as many companies worldwide, to tease out their conclusions on what works and what doesn't when doing business online--with brash start-ups as well as brick-and-mortar giants. That serious-minded, Harvard-quality sleuthing is reflected in the long narratives that make up the meat of the book, detailing the complete online journeys of some of the world's most high-profile companies, from venerable offliners venturing online (among them, Arrow Electronics, Barnes & Noble, NBC, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, IBM, Williams-Sonoma, and Sun) to the Net-born (Amazon, eBay, Razorfish, EarthWeb, iXL, Renren.com, and Abuzz, which clearly emerges here as Kanter's pet model of how to do it right in entrepreneurial cyberspace). If you've followed the start-up scene with eagle eyes every day for the past five years, you might already be familiar with these companies' twisting, turning story lines. If, more likely, you haven't, you're in for some illuminating object lessons on what works (and what doesn't) on the precarious, often uncharted terrain of e-commerce--not to mention some really good reading.

Shortly before Evolve! went to press, Kanter added two new chapters to address the latest changes in the e-commerce market. That's a valuable update, but even if she'd skipped the postscript, Evolve! is blessedly free of reckless cybermania. And, unlike many such dot-com how-tos, it's wise enough to know that, far from having completely rewritten the rules of good business, the callow world of e-commerce has much to learn from the offline forbears it often scoffs at. For these reasons, the observations and advisories in Evolve! should transcend the inevitable fluctuations of the e-commerce market in the years to come. In other words, this is the real thing: smart, deeply researched advice from a pro whose talents are evident on every page. Well, except for the rap lyrics she's penned for "Evolve!--The Song," which kick off the book, and run along such lines: "You're not alone, so start placing your bet/On finding lots of partners throughout the Net!" Cole Porter she's not. Then again, maybe they wouldn't sound so lame if only we could get that other old pro, Eartha Kitt, to slip into her catsuit and purr her way through them. --Timothy Murphy...

Authors: Christina Haas.
Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum
Publication Date: 1995-11-01
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    This volume deals with the relationship of writing to its technologies. It uses history, theory and empirical research to argue that the effects of computer technologies on literacy are complex. The author argues that just as computers impact on discourse, discourse itself impacts technology....

Authors:
Paperback, 182 pages
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
Publication Date: 2000-05


Reviews :

    What happens when the means of communication, often centralized, become diffused? What happens when coalitions in South Africa, Malawi, China, Russia, Turkey, Burma, El Salvador, and the United States utilize electronic technologies to seek enfranchisement? This book describes such creative uses by emergent democratic movements and other cultural alliances seeking solidarity in these countries. It investigates the way the strange confluence of technological language and radical social change opens new discursive terrain. Unusual fissures and interstices appear; some auger well for the distribution of political power and the promotion of free speech, while unfortunately some open gaps within old hierarchies implicit in capitalistic discourses of technology....

Authors: Dave Reay.
Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Macmillan
Publication Date: 2006-09-05


Reviews :

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