Wired.com just posted my review of Nick Bilton’s new book, “I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works.” Bilton, the New York Times lead technology blogger, is a friend, but as you’ll see, I have a few friendly criticisms of his work. Sometime in the coming weeks, I’ll have an interview with him here on techPresident, discussing these questions.
I am not a technochondriac, Nick Bilton’s wonderful word for the naysayers and worrywarts who think that our texting-obsessed kids will never read another book and that online social networking is destroying the bonds that hold real communities together. I love our brave new gadget-filled hyper-connected world.
And I loved reading Bilton’s romp through the fear-filled fields of the past, when some worried that trains would asphyxiate passengers if they went more than 20 mph, and the august New York Times rumbled (back in 1876) that “the telephone, by bringing music and ministers into every home, will empty the concert halls and the churches.” Every politician now making headlines by attacking Craigslist or video games for supposedly corrupting society should find the time to read Bilton’s new book, “I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works.”
But there’s still something that irks me about the balmy charm of his book’s title and overarching thesis. I’m sorry, but I think the technology-driven future that Bilton lives in is already here, and unless we recognize what we’re doing to ourselves as a society, and make some deliberate adjustments, the effects of all this new technology cannot be simply described as benign.
My beef is not, by the way, with Bilton’s fascinating discussion of how our brains are adapting to multimedia and multitasking. We’ll adjust to a world filled with smartphones in much the same way our grandparents adjusted to a world filled with phones.
Nor is my complaint with how he weighs and dismisses the fears of today’s media executives, who desperately want to force people to pay for old content models. Journalism — the act of reporting and making sense of the news — has a long and healthy future ahead of it, I am convinced, and Bilton outlines many smart ways that journalists will get paid for their work, drawn from his experience working in The New York Times R&D labs.
I have two concerns with Bilton’s overall argument, which I offer in a spirit of constructive criticism….
Read the rest here.
November 02, 2010