Book Notes

It's been a while since I did a book post here. Here are a few newish books I think are worth your time.

My pick for best book of 2008 is Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Jackson's main topic is attention, but the book is about much more than that. She surveys the impact of technology on modern society from a wide variety of angles and sources, including science, literature, philosophy, and personal interviews. The style is more journalism than popular science, which seems to have disappointed some of the Amazon reviewers. If you liked the style of Bill McKibben's Enough then you'll probably like this one.

According to Jackson's website the book is coming out in paperback in September.

My pick for best book of 2009 (so far) is the second edition of Hubert Dreyfus's On The Internet. I wrote about the first edition (published in 2001) previously. A lot has changed since then and it shows in this heavy revision. Dreyfus's previous pessimism about whether search will ever work on the Internet is largely gone now, thanks to the success of Google. The book's second topic, distance learning, is less hyped these days so Dreyfus devotes less attention here to debunking it. In new material he describes his positive experiences with podcasting lectures via iTunesU and his not-so-positive experience lecturing in Second Life. For Dreyfus, embodiment is vital to experience, and his critique of Second Life and telepresence in general follows that argument, using ideas from Heidegger and existentialist philosophers.

On The Internet is part of Routledge's Thinking In Action series of books applying philosophy to contemporary topics. Hubert Dreyfus is one of the foremost philosophers of technology and also possibly the world's leading expert on Heidegger. If you ever decide to tackle Being and Time, as I am thinking of doing this year, then check out Dreyfus's Heidegger course on iTunes. It's probably my only hope of halfway understanding that book.

Finally, just in time for the silliness of switching to daylight savings time this weekend, you may want to check out Michael Downing's Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. This is a revised edition of a book that came out a few years ago at the same time as another book on the same topic by David Prerau called Seize the Daylight. I have not yet read either, but I picked up Downing's book based on the strength of a previous book of his I read (Shoes Outside The Door). There is an excerpt from Spring Forward at Downing's site.

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Comments

[philosoraptor]

(delurking)

I'm very glad to know that there's an updated edition of the book, and curious to see for myself how it differs from the original edition.
In your review of that first edition, you suggested that Dreyfus offers us new ways to think more deeply about what Internet technologies do and do not offer. That's a very generous interpretation of both the tone and the effect of that book, I think! The "voice" in that edition is of someone insisting that certain things can never work, rather than that of someone actually marshalling evidence to show that they can't work. The chapter on "nihilism" was particularly egregious in that respect.