T. Pepper

For a historical narrative of the first ten years of Google, this book captures the facts along several threads which may or may not prove to be significant in another ten years time. What I felt was lacking were the big personalities, the inner conflicts, and plain good storytelling. I doubt that these hallmarks are nonexistent at Google but it may reflect more in Levy's inability in 2010 to crack this nut into the lovely, dynamic tech tales ala The Soul of a New Machine. It's equally possible that those tomes can only be created after a business has failed and all NDAs are void. Regardless, I'll wait for that book, it'll be worth the wait.

Reading this book on the media of TV 35+ years after its publication, one might expect the arguments to be dated but they read more like a history than a polemic. The book's central argument about what can be lost in the transition from print media to screen ring true. Simultaneously, Postman speaks negatively about computers, unable to predict the mini renaissance of the written word that they induced and sadly peaked in Web 2.0 which certainly benefited my cohort. Yet that was a temporary modality before the next generation and supporting broadband enabled video media to consume the literal and figurative bandwidth with the same entertainment driving force that TV brought in the century prior. So, it was with that background that I heard his debates and nodded my head with the post-modern media reality of both disinformation and drivel. Both televised politics and religion are worse for the decades in this medium. Education, his third key area, I am less convinced on. Importantly, some of the fundamentals have shifted. The technology has had a democratizing effect and media gatekeepers have been upended. Individual streamers, vloggers, and channel managers are living in the paradox of the entertainment drift of their media and aren't universally making the same choices although many surely have engaged the “sell out”. Others have not. They are not beholden to shareholders. Market share is no longer a zero sum game with fixed channels and time slots. Truly weird things can and do thrive (e.g. ASMR). Discerning viewers can cultivate very different feeds than others. Let me know if anyone has more contemporary critiques in the legacy of McLuhan and Postman.

When Newport finished his manuscript for this book, he wouldn't have known that the 12 months prior to the book's release would have shifted knowledge workers ever deeper into the hyperactive hive mind spiral which he describes in part 1 of the book. That has been true for me and the sneaking suspicion that email begets more email and more busyness than actual productivity validated. My 5-star signifies that this was the right book for me at this moment in time and that it is a part of an ongoing conversation in retooling what work should look like, enabled by the benefits of tech and less encumbered by their unintended consequences.

The introduction alone is a tour de force. The rest of the book a matter of fact laying out of the themes and actors already familiar to my tribe but never assembled to elicit this response. There is scant first person exposition, which I find remarkable. Ultimately “Layla” plays during the entire final chapter and recent events, post-publishing, continue on the theme and I predict the song will keep playing as we continue to learn the implications of this particular brand of masculinity.