Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think? The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future / edited by John Brockman; w/ Introduction by W. Daniel Hillis

Edge.org is an online community and independently organized think tank which keeps tabs on some of the more important intellectual issues of the day. Every year the organization poses a question to a some of the world's smartest individuals and publishes the responses. Since 2005, each question and answer series has led to a book. In 2010 it was  "Is the Internet changing the way you think?" and, as expected, the results from the over 150 respondents, all of them qualified intellectuals mostly in the math and science fields, provided a sizable amount of philosophical and cognitively astute analysis.

Though each segment is obviously backed up by solidly well-concieved ideas, the contributions become redundant after the first few responses. The thinkers get kind of dense as they plow through lots of socratically-tinged postulations, going into elaborative explanations which neither give a direct answer or offer a concise analysis. In more than a few cases, they actually ask a new question ("the question we should be asking is . . .") and proceed to answer it in equally dense, rambling fashion. It's a book which is more amusing (at least at first) than informative though it will inevitably attract readers of a more philosophical bend to scrutinize some of the content. The most interesting response? Maybe the poetically inclined statement of Italian architect Stefano Boeri who begins with the words, "internet is wind", and rallies his abstract assessment in equally metaphorical fashion by stating that "this wind becomes precious occasions to understand what we cannot say, what we are not willing to deposit in the forum of planetary simultaneity." Uh huh? (004.678 IS)

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting The World / by David Kirkpatrick

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It started off simply enough. In 2003, 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard when he hacked into the university database and devised an interactive website which invited students to compare the looks of their fellow classmates. From this slightly sordid endeavor sprung the brainchild that would become Facebook. In roughly five years, Zuckerberg and a small assortment of business partners grew the company to its current monolithic status, influencing the development of online communities and connecting people all over the world in the process.

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Facebook is now the largest social network, having recently overtaken Myspace and Twitter and maintaining a steady lead over the rest of the pack. Despite its drawbacks including urgent claims about invasion of privacy, allowances for potentially harmful situations, borderline illicit content and matters of intellectual freedom, it grows larger everyday with multitudes of newer converts added to the directory hourly. It's rare to find high school or college students, and increasingly more adults who do not maintain a personal account and routinely visit the site. And while its potential pitfalls are readily pointed out, most won't argue over its staying power. Facebook has demonstrated a flexible attitude of adaptability to accompany its progressive innovation, becoming a thoroughly "familiar and ubiquitous part of the Internet." (p. 85). Furthermore, the impact of the site is so profound that it's influencing lives offline as well as online, re-envisioning the world of who our "friends" really are and how we connect.

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Veteran technology journalist and author David Kirkpatrick investigates the phenomenon which has revolutionized the concept of social life, and indeed altered the nature of marketing and communications. With the full cooperation of the company's executives including founder and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Kirkpatrick dissects both the role and function of Facebook, examining the remarkable rise of the company which is now among the world's fastest growing corporations. The author also does a good job tying everything together well enough for technology novices and persons outside the social networking clique to grasp. So for anyone unfamiliar with the site, the general concept and pertinent details are provided in solid, plausible explanations. The movie The Social Network, which appears soon in theaters, chronicles essentially the same story albeit without Zuckerberg's cooperation who has since claimed that he'd "just wished that nobody made a movie about me while I was still alive."* (338.7 KIRKPATRICK)

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*Fried, Ina. "Zuckerberg on the Hotseat at D8". Beyond Binary. CNET.com. June 2, 2010.