Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

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Review: Privacy for Sale–How Computerization Has Made Everyone’s Private Life an Open Secret

4 Star, Privacy

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4.0 out of 5 stars In Your Face and In Your Best Interests,

April 7, 2000
Jeffrey Rothfeder
This book is a perfect complement to Anne Branscomb's, and provides a well-told tale, researched in partnership with a private investigator, of just what can be gotten on you through the electronic web within which we all live our lives. This book is the tactical gutter in your face version, Branscomb's book is the academic dissection.
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Review: Rebels Against The Future–The Luddites And Their War On The Industrial Revolution: Lessons For The Computer Age

5 Star, History, Information Society, Insurgency & Revolution
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4.0 out of 5 stars Luddites, Technology, Industrialism, and Humanity,

April 7, 2000
Kirkpatrick Sale
Lessons from the Luddites for the Computer Age include: 1) Technologies are never neutral, and some are hurtful; 2) Industrialism is always a cataclysmic process, destroying the past, roiling the present, making the future uncertain; 3) “Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines.”; 4) The nation-state, synergistically intertwined with industrialism, will always come to its aid and defense, making revolts futile and reform ineffectual; 5) But resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary; 6) Politically, resistance to industrialism must force not only “the machine question” but the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate; 7) Philosophically, resistance to industrialism must be embedded in an analysis-an ideology, perhaps-that is morally informed, carefully articulated, and widely shared; 8) If the edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble as a result of determined resistance within its very walls, it seems certain to crumble of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities within not more than a few decades, perhaps sooner, after which there may be space for alternative societies to arise.
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Review: Forbidden Knowledge–From Prometheus to Pornography

5 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Education (General), Information Society

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5.0 out of 5 stars From Scary to Sacred to Secret–Essential Insights,

April 7, 2000
Roger Shattuck
Beyond the mundane discussions about secrecy versus openness, or privacy versus transparency, there is a much higher level of discussion, one about the nature, limits, and morality of knowledge. As I read this book, originally obtained to put secrecy into perspective, I suddenly grasped and appreciated two of the author's central thoughts: knowing too much too fast can be dangerous; and yes, there are things we should not know or be exposed to. Who decides? Or How do we the people decide? are questions that must be factored into any national knowledge policy or any national information strategy. This book left me with a sense of both the sacred and the scary sides of unfettered knowledge. This is less about morality and more about focus, intention, and social outcomes. It is about the convergence of power, knowledge, and love to achieve an enlightened intelligence network of self-governing moral people who are able to defend themselves against evil knowledge and prosper by sharing good knowledge.
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Review: Powershift–Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

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5.0 out of 5 stars One of Five Really Core Books on Information Age,

April 7, 2000
Alvin Toffler
Alvin augments our vocabulary with terms like “info-warrior”, “eco-spasm”, “super-symbolic economy” and “powershift.” He examines the relationship between violence, wealth, and knowledge and concludes that an entirely new system of wealth creation is emerging, as well as entirely new approach to information dissemination that places most of our command and control, communications, computing, and intelligence (C4I) investment in the dump heap with the Edsels of the past. He anticipates both the emergence of information wars at all levels, and the demise of bureaucracy. He cautions us about the emerging power of the “Global Gladiators”-religions, corporations, and terrorists (nice little mix) and concludes that in order for nations to maintain their strategic edge, an effective intelligence apparatus will be a necessity and will “boom” in the 21st Century, with the privatization of intelligence being its most prominent break from the past.
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Review: Knowledge Without Boundaries–What America’s Research Universities Can Do for the Economy, the Workplace, and the Community

4 Star, Change & Innovation, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Information Operations, Information Society

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4.0 out of 5 stars What Universities Might Do Better for Their Communities,

April 7, 2000
Mary Lindenstein Walshok

An industrial sociologist by training, now Associate Vice Chancellor for Extended Studies and Public Service at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Walshok begins by challenging universities, exploring the social uses of knowledge, assessing the new knowledge needs of diverse populations, and providing a matrix approach to matching university resources to community knowledge needs. In the second half of the book she focuses on special economic, human, and civic benefits, and ends with her bottom line: neither communities, nor universities, can learn in isolation.

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Review: Consilience–The Unity of Knowledge

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Creating World Brain and the Virtual Intelligence Community,

April 7, 2000
Edward O. Wilson
EDITED 9 July 2007 to add comment and links to other books.

Comment: This is still one of the best books for someone who wants to think deeply about knowledge. Below are links to some others I recommend.

Our answer to Levy, but an order of magnitude more practical and steeped in some of the best endnotes I've ever enjoyed. Consilience is the “jumping together” of knowledge across boundaries, and the greatest enterprise of the mind. He begins with an example, showing how biology, ethics, social science, and environmental policy must all come together to properly resolve a global environmental issue, but actually do not-the learned individuals are fragmented into four separate communities, and within those communities further fragmented into nationalities and cliques and jobs, and it is our greater loss for we cannot arrive at the best policy without being able to integrate the knowledge across all these boundaries. He emphasizes that the public must be educated and have access to this unified knowledge, not just the policymakers. He poses, and then answers across the book, this question: “What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important to human welfare?” In my own mind, Edward O. Wilson has defined both national and global intelligence writ large, and done so in way that suggests the “virtual intelligence community” is a very practical and achievable vision.

The Future of Life
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
The Age of Missing Information
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Information Productivity: Assessing Information Management Costs of U. S. Corporations

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Review: Secrets of the Super Searchers–The Accumulated Wisdom of 23 of the World?s Top Online Searchers

5 Star, Intelligence (Commercial)

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5.0 out of 5 stars “Master's Class” for Information-Driven Smart People,

April 7, 2000
Reva Basch
Reva, one of the top five information brokers in the USA, sought out and interviewed 35 professional or gifted amateur commercial online (fee for service) searchers and provides in this book a delightful free-flowing conversation with each of them as a “master's class” for intelligence and information professionals.
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