John Palfrey, Urs Gasser: Born Digital. Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · digital natives, filesharing, internet, privacy, sociology, technology, youth
The first generation of “Digital Natives”—children who were born into and raised in the digital world—are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these Digital Natives? And what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of these young people, who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Exploring a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical, Born Digital will be essential reading for parents, teachers, and the myriad of confused adults who want to understand the digital present—and shape the digital future.
Publisher Basic Books, 2008
ISBN 0465005152, 9780465005154
375 pages
authors
publisher
google books
PDF (updated on 2013-3-13)
Comments (2)Chris Anderson: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006/2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · business, economics, internet, marketing
In the most important business book since The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson shows how the future of commerce and culture isn’t in hits, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to be regarded as misses—the endlessly long tail of that same curve.
The book examines how, thanks to a drop in the cost of reaching consumers, the marketplace is changing from a one-size-fits-all model to an abundance of variety to appeal to consumers who want more of a choice, and can get it thanks to the commercial viability of distribution, manufacturing, and marketing.
Publisher Hyperion, 2006
ISBN 978-1-4013-8725-9
Length 268 pages
Peter T. Leeson: The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1600s, 1700s, economics, history, piracy, pirates
Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss–it’s time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates’ notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of Skull & Bones? Why did they create a “pirate code”? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made them so successful? The Invisible Hook uses economics to examine these and other infamous aspects of piracy. Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits.
The Invisible Hook looks at legendary pirate captains like Blackbeard, Black Bart Roberts, and Calico Jack Rackam, and shows how pirates’ search for plunder led them to pioneer remarkable and forward-thinking practices. Pirates understood the advantages of constitutional democracy–a model they adopted more than fifty years before the United States did so. Pirates also initiated an early system of workers’ compensation, regulated drinking and smoking, and in some cases practiced racial tolerance and equality. Leeson contends that pirates exemplified the virtues of vice–their self-seeking interests generated socially desirable effects and their greedy criminality secured social order. Pirates proved that anarchy could be organized.
Revealing the democratic and economic forces propelling history’s most colorful criminals, The Invisible Hook establishes pirates’ trailblazing relevance to the contemporary world.
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2009
ISBN 0691137471, 9780691137476
Length 271 pages