Information Abundance

This read­ing list is sup­posed to serve as a use­ful coun­ter­weight to those techno-utopian works that spend too much energy cheer-leading and no time focus­ing the world on the real prob­lems and threats that the Inter­net has pro­duced. I’ve included a num­ber of authors who rumi­nate on the risks of mind­lessly embrac­ing pow­er­ful tools before we under­stand them, with­out rais­ing apoc­a­lyp­tic fears to scrap the under­tak­ing alto­gether. They are NOT the work of Lud­dites or techno­phobes. HT to Siva Vaid­hyanathan for trig­ger­ing this list with her review of Delete.

Read­ing List

• To read
• Rec­om­mended
• You have bet­ter things to do

• Nicholas Carr. The Shal­lows: What the Inter­net is Doing To Our Brains, 2010 [web­site]
• Andrew Keen. Cult of the Ama­teur, 2007 [blurb]
• Jaron Lanier. You Are Not a Gad­get: A Man­i­festo, 2010
• Eliz­a­beth Losh. Vir­tu­alpoli­tik: An Elec­tronic His­tory of Gov­ern­ment Media-Making in a Time of War, Scan­dal, Dis­as­ter, Mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and Mis­takes, 2009 [blurb]
• Farhad Man­joo. True Enough: Learn­ing to Live in a Post-Fact Soci­ety, 2008 [The same tech­nolo­gies that give us con­trol over what we and read also let us sub­scribe to dif­fer­ent facts. The Well]
• Vik­tor Mayer-Schönberger. Delete: The Virtue of For­get­ting in the Dig­i­tal Age, 2009 [blurb]
• Daniel J. Solove
  • The Future of Rep­u­ta­tion: Gos­sip, Rumor, and Pri­vacy on the Inter­net, 2007 [blurb]
  • Under­stand­ing Pri­vacy, 2008 [blurv]
• Cass R. Sunstein
  • Republic.com 2.0, 2007 [blurb]
  • Info­topia: How Many Minds Pro­duce Knowl­edge, 2006 [blurb. Mem­o­rable for “infor­ma­tion cocoons, the cozy insu­late of com­fort­ing opin­ions that reaf­firm our core beliefs.]
• Jonathan Zit­train. The Future of the Inter­net — And How to Stop iIt, 2007 [online, pre­view. We are fac­ing within five years a sig­nif­i­cant, dev­as­tat­ing and immi­nent attack on Inter­net infra­struc­ture, caused by one of very many who have deployed “mal­ware” to the Inter­net. When it hap­pens, gov­ern­ments will have every­thing they need to argue for a rad­i­cal change in the free­dom of the Inter­net. Unless we pre­pare now… Great, con­vinc­ing, level-headed arguments.]