New non-fiction on technology ...

As part of a series of posts about new non-fiction books, I am adding reviews about three new titles which deal with Technology.

I especially liked THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE by Scott Hartley which refers to descriptors for students of the humanities and social sciences (fuzzies) and students of engineering or hard sciences (techies) at Stanford where Hartley completed his undergraduate work. His forthcoming book stresses the advantages of a fuzzy-techie partnership as our society grapples with transformative technologies like the rise of robots, artificial intelligence, and application of big data.
  

Hartley uses the subtitle “Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World” to advocate for increasing the human factor and adding more ethics into our technical tools.  There’s even a chapter titled Building a Better World. I focused, though, on the one about education where Hartley references works like Moonshots in Education by Palo Alto High School teacher Esther Wojcicki. Both of these authors explain that blended learning “fosters creative confidence and complex problem solving in students.  The learning-by-doing philosophy allows students not only to struggle with projects, but also to fail, teaching that such failures are inevitable and that perseverance is vital to success.”  This is a key issue that many of our faculty grappled with at a recent two-day workshop on critical thinking with Gerald Nosich.  We even talked about a favorite quote from Seth Godin: “Being wrong until you are right:  Are there any other options for people who seek to innovate?”

Speaking of innovation, BECOMING FACEBOOK by Mike Hoefflinger is subtitled “The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World.”  I think this work will be of special interest to our students, even though many may not recall a time without Facebook.  In his Preface, Hoefflinger contrasts the company in 2009 (150 million users, $270 million in revenue and an uncertain future) with its position in 2015: 2.2 billion users, increased market value to over $300 billion and annual revenue to nearly $18 billion. He goes on to outline those challenges and make some incredible claims, saying, “this book is the story of what happened in those seven years and what may happen in the next ten.  From the inside.”

Full disclosure: I am not a Facebook user though I do worry about how it causes social disruption in terms of online bullying and the propagation of fake news and violent videos. [Related article: New York Times (4/25/17) "Can Facebook Fix its Own Worse Bug?"] Hoefflinger (who served as Facebook’s Lead, Global Business Marketing) argues that “free-to-use Internet-based services like … Facebook, cannot afford to act with anything but wild abandon.”  Does that seem irresponsible and worrisome? Perhaps, especially as he says a few pages later that Facebook has “closely held onto the assets that are core (information about people and their connections).” So what might happen to that data? Are not some of the recently raised issues about content and privacy the result of Facebook needing to come of age as a corporate citizen? Offering an insider’s perspective, BECOMING FACEBOOK is an interesting and thoughtful analysis, although it seems a little thin on research and supporting documentation from outside sources.

PLUGGED IN, on the other hand, was written by two university professors, Patti M. Valkenburg and Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, and explores “How Media Attract and Affect Youth.” It is definitely an academic work, published by Yale University Press and with close to 15% of the text involving footnotes and sources.  This text addresses some very important topics such as media and violence, advertising, and gaming across several age ranges.  For example, in the chapter on media and education, the authors acknowledge that the potential for educational platforms other than television is still being understood. They cite numerous studies about the ever younger ages at which children are accessing screens and note findings like “whereas two- to four-year-olds spend slightly more than an hour a day using educational media, eight- to ten-year-olds are estimated to spend only forty-two minutes a day with such content.”

They describe our present day networked society as revolving around the individual, conjuring an image of “a contemporary family sitting in a restaurant, parents and children glued to their own phones, unaware of one another” which complements Turkle’s work in Reclaiming Conversation. Overall, I think PLUGGED IN addresses a high interest topic for our students, but its valuable insights are masked by a very academic tone.    

The next set of non-fiction reviews will center on books dealing with economic opportunity.

Invisible Influence by Berger and The Inevitable by Kelly

If you are curious about understanding the present and predicting the future, then be sure to look for these two new non-fiction titles. 

Invisible Influence is written by Jonah Berger, associate professor of marketing at The Wharton School and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On.  Berger’s work is subtitled “The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior" and is very easy to read, filled with simple explanations or diagrams and plenty of examples along with memorable recaps such as “Monkey See, Monkey Do” for a section on mimicry, imitation and peer influence. Berger also includes chapters on differentiation and the tensions between familiarity and novelty.  Whether he is explaining research with cockroaches, modern art, or college students, Invisible Influence will appeal to our students with interests in decision-making, psychology and the social sciences – turns out “conformity” is important and not just to adolescents.  

While Berger is seeking to explain why we do what we do, Kevin Kelly predicts future technological trends in The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape our Future. Kevin Kelly, Wired founding executive editor and author of 2010’s What Technology Wants, labels each chapter with a verb (e.g., flowing, cognifying, and remixing). In “Screening,” he devotes time to discussing the role of libraries.  Kelly says that “the link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Noting how reading becomes social, he asks what will happen when “all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of connected words and ideas?”

I found myself starring numerous sections and concepts.  One example (in Accessing) is when Kelly quotes a TechCrunch reporter: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles, Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content, Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.  And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.  Something interesting is happening.” In yet another section (Questioning), Kelly recounts his initial skepticism in regards to Wikipedia, concluding, “Once you confront the fact that it works, you have to shift your expectation of what else there may be that is impossible in theory but might work in practice.”

Kelly raises some important points for us as teachers and for our students who are learning to be researchers when he says, “rather than receiving truth from an authority, I am reduced to assembling from the liquid stream of facts flowing through the web.”  He writes at length about how he actively begins a project – being less contemplative and “doing things. I immediately go.  I go looking, searching, asking questioning, reacting, leaping in, constructing notes, bookmarks, a trail – I start making something mine.” That is a mindset and pattern of behavior we need to encourage – not stifle - in our classes. I often tell students that it is so important how you ask the question and Kelly concurs, saying “answers become cheap and questions become valuable.” The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that will Shape our Future includes extensive notes and is most definitely worth reading and pondering as we try to anticipate how technology is impacting our current and future behaviors.