For the Bookshelf: Current Thought on Digital Media

These books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels, and record albums are broken down into bit and bytes; the growing immediacy of real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political websites place on subjectivity.

The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
"Reading in the traditional sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet. What we are engaged in—like birds of prey looking for their next meal—is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information."

The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen, a technology entrepreneur

Argues that Web 2.0 is creating a "digital forest of mediocrity" and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise.

Cyberselfish, by Paulina Borsook
Notes the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Describes tech-heads as having "an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent."
Contends that even older digerati want to think of themselves as "having an Inner Bike Messenger."

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
The Internet makes "cyberbalkanization" possible. Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite websites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier for people "to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions."

Serendipitous encounters with personal and ideas different from one's own tend to grow less frequent, while "views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, cam be found in large number on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities." Studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Explores the effects of the Internet on public discourse.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
Suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo, Slate's technology columnist
Examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact.

The way in which "information now moves through society on—currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality"—has fostered deception and propaganda and also created a world where "the very idea of objective reality is under attack."

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality
What becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes "metaness" and regards mash-ups as "more important that the sources who were mashed?"

Because the Internet is a kind of "pseudo-world" without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, it can also devolve into a "Lord of the Flies"-like nastiness, with lots of "bullying, voracious irritability, and selfishness"—qualities enhanced by the anonymity, peer pressure, and mob rule that thrive online.

"Digital culture is comprised of [sic] wave after wave of juvenilia, with rooms of M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks."

Thanks to Michiko Kakutani and The New York Times for this mash-up