This is no laughing matter or a mathematical jest, in the post-Internet age that we are in, Keen cautions. “What had once appeared as a joke now seems to foretell the consequences of a flattening of culture that is blurring the lines between traditional audience and author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur.”

In today’s networked world, personal computers replace typewriters, and users take the place of monkeys, describes the author. Only, instead of creating masterpieces, “these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys – many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins – are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.”

Hard-hitting, especially to those hitting the keys hard!

E-commerce in China is still in its infancy, writes John Pomfret in Chinese Lessons ( www.henryholt.com). “Few Chinese have credit cards, making it difficult to pay for items purchased online.” And there is a bigger problem: “Without any regulatory system, China is awash in bogus Internet business selling fictitious products. The lack of morality and paucity of trust that pervade Chinese society have found their way to cyberspace,” the author rues.

But the cyberspace is continually monitored. With just a click of the mouse, Chinese police can read all of the posts made on Web sites and zero in on the offenders, such as those who’d called for “China to begin negotiations with the Dalai Lama.” People were routinely hauled off for lesser crimes, reminisces Pomfret. “In 2004 and 2005, state security agents rounded up scores of people for posting their opinions on the Internet, slapping them with lengthy prison terms. In 2005, for the sixth year in a row, China had more journalists in prison than any other country.”

Among the pages, you’d meet Henry, “a fresh-faced graduate in computer sciences from a prestigious university in Nanjing,” hired by the Jiangsu Provincial Internet police bureau, one of five hundred around the country. “His job was to protect ‘internal security’, which meant he was one of the snoops reading people’s e-mails, monitoring their accounts, policing Internet chat rooms for anti-government discussions, and generally ensuring that the thoughts of China’s Netizens stayed pure….”

Page-turner.

The majority of the victims lost in the sinking of the Titanic were second- and third-class passengers, and immigrants and workers in steerage below, writes Byron L. Dorgan in ‘Take This Job and Ship It’ ( www.stmartins.com). Similarly the current job losses in the US hit the less affluent, he says. “The wealthy grab the lifeboats, and the rest flounder. ‘Sink or swim,’ workers are told. ‘Compete with thirty-cent-an-hour labour or lose your job, that’s just the new reality of the global economy,’ they say.”

In a chapter titled ‘Flat world? No, flat wrong!’ the author looks at the flaws in Thomas Friedman’s ‘flat’ argument. The world isn’t flat, says Dorgan. “Our trade agreements aren’t fair. And outsourcing American jobs hurts our country.” This is not a flat world, but a tilted one, scoffs Dorgan. Tilted in favour of the largest corporations, where “minimum wages, the right to organise, the requirement to have a safe workplace, child-labour laws, and environmental standards… are in full-scale retreat.” Instead of trying to pull other countries up, the US is getting pushed to diminish its standards “to compete in the global economy,” he warns.

Worries worth catching up with.

Why are your cell-phone and camera so absurdly complicated? “Misled by flexibility,” answers Jeffrey Kluger in ‘Simplexity’ ( www.johnmurray.co.uk). “Electronic devices, by any rational measure, have gone mad,” he laments.

“It’s not just your TV or your camera or your twenty-seven-button cell-phone with its twenty-one different screen menus and its 124-page instruction manual.

It’s your camcorder and your stereo and your BlackBerry and your microwave and your dishwasher and your dryer and even your new multi-function coffee-maker which in any sane world would have just one job to do and that’s to make a good cup of coffee.” As a result, it is no longer a straightforward plug-and-play experience that greets you when buying electronic products.

It is “a laborious, joy-killing exercise in unpacking, reading, puzzling out, configuring, testing, cursing, reconfiguring, stopping altogether to call the customer support line, then calling again an hour or two later, until you finally get whatever it is you’ve bought up and operating in some tentative configuration that more or less does all the things you want it to do – at least until some error message causes the whole precarious assembly to crash and you have to start all over again…”

Ideal escape from complex gizmos!

The National Security Agency (NSA) in the US employs 30,000 electronic eavesdroppers to collect and interpret communications from around the world, while the CIA’s Directorate of Operations – its human spies – has only about four thousand employees, informs Graham Allison in ‘Nuclear Terrorism’ ( www.constablerobinson.com). Yet, “the most sophisticated secret technologies cannot uncover small-scale insider theft, or even nuclear efforts camouflaged in highly visible civilian research programs,” he says, thus emphasising on the need for ‘more creative, diverse human sources of intelligence’. Another suggestion that the author offers for countering the threat of nuclear terrorism is to enhance data-mining efforts to process, analyse, and disseminate open sources of intelligence such as “international media broadcasts, Internet chat rooms, financial markets, and court proceedings.”

Of critical relevance.

There is a new wave of prediction that utilises the wisdom of crowds in a way that goes beyond conscious preferences, says Ian Ayres in ‘Super Crunchers’ ( www.johnmurray.co.uk). It is eHarmony, the discovery of a new wisdom of crowds through Super Crunching. How does it work? “Unlike traditional dating services that solicit and match people based on their conscious and articulated preferences, eHarmony tries to find out what kind of person you are and then matches you with others who the data say are most compatible.”

It searches through its large database “to see what types of personalities actually are happy together as couples.” Neil Clark Warren, eHarmony’s founder, studied more than 5,000 married people in the late 1990s, and then patented ‘a predictive statistical model of compatibility based on twenty-nine different variables related to a person’s emotional temperament, social style, cognitive mode, and relationship skills…’

Unputdownable.

Tailpiece

“The most popular game in our office is…”

“Solitaire?”

“No, Buck-Pass!”

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

More Stories on : Books | Books 2 Byte

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page