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    What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
    Unavailable
    What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
    Unavailable
    What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
    Audiobook10 hours

    What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier

    Written by James Gleick

    Narrated by Dan Cashman

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Here's some of what just happened: Millions of ordinary, sensible people came into possession of computers. These machines had wondrous powers, yet made unexpected demands on their owners. Telephones broke free of the chains that had shackled them to bedside tables and office desks. No one was out of touch, or wanted to be out of touch. Instant communication became a birthright.

    A new world, located no one knew exactly where, came into being, called "virtual" or "online," named "cyberspace" or "the Internet" or just "the network." Manners and markets took on new shapes and guises.

    As all this was happening, James Gleick, author of the groundbreaking Chaos, columnist for The New York Times Magazine, and-very briefly-an Internet entrepreneur, emerged as one of our most astute guides to this new world. His dispatches-by turns passionate, bewildered, angry, and amazed-form an extraordinary chronicle. Gleick loves what the network makes possible, and he hates it. Software makers developed a strangely tolerant view of an ancient devil, the product defect. One company, at first a feisty upstart, seized control of the hidden gears and levers of the new economy. We wrestled with novel issues of privacy, anonymity, and disguise. We found that if the human species is evolving a sort of global brain, it's susceptible to new forms of hysteria and multiple-personality disorder.

    What Just Happened is at once a remarkable portrait of a world in the throes of transformation and a prescient guide to the transformation still to come.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 28, 2002
    ISBN9781415911907
    Unavailable
    What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
    Author

    James Gleick

    James Gleick was born in New York in 1954. He worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of Chaos, Genius, Faster, What Just Happened and a biography of Isaac Newton.

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    Reviews for What Just Happened

    3.5/5

    31 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      In the introduction to this collection of articles/essays on technology, Gleick comments on how much things have changed. He comments on what he got right and what he got wrong. And he laughs about a certain naiveté that existed when he wrote the articles. This introduction was written for the book’s publication in 2002. Imagine what another eight years has done.Surprisingly, it has not made the articles irrelevant. Rather, it has made these snapshots in time even more amazing. And it makes the book that much more enjoyable. It would have been very easy for this to be a book we laugh at; a book where we sit in our smug future and guffaw at the yokels who had to use dial-up. However, Gleick’s writing is excellent and his style allows him to tell the stories in a way that is forward-looking enough that the pieces do not become stuck in the past. What this means is that each article, while, again, a snapshot of the times, still manages to speak to our current technological situations. Sure, he may be marveling at the idea that phones could change beyond recognition (a snapshot of a time where they just rang and we just answered them), but it is written in a way that makes the reader want to take a look and see what we take for granted right now that may be about to go through seismic change.Well worth the read to remember what has happened, and to help prepare for what is to come.
    • 4/5
      In this technological age, you may find yourself, when you have a moment to yourself, sitting and asked, "what just happened?"Moore's law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. This law is usually generalized to say that every two years, our computing power doubles.So, imagine however many years ago it was that you first got a computer, and all the wonderful, speedy things you could do with it. Now, think how many years ago that was (call that number n). By Moore's law, a computer made with the latest technological advancements would be 2^(n/2) times faster than your first computer, which is impressive, unless you got your first computer today (if so, then welcome to the Internet!).Gleick has collected here several articles written by him in the past, chronicling the information frontier from the front line. We see an earlier Microsoft dealing with their smaller collection of users. We see an early look at this Internet thing. We see a first-hand account of that era's emerging technologies, all of which we take for granted, or look at in the same light as we would a Model-T. And Gleick was there, writing it all down as it happened.This book would definitely be of interest to computer "historians" (and thanks to Moore's law, a computer paleontologist only needs to dig around in a basement, and not the Badlands, to find "ancient" relics), as well as those interested enough in technology to not take it as for granted as most.
    • 4/5
      Covers some interesting (although dated) ground. It makes me want to go back and re-live the mid-90's all over again.
    • 1/5
      A very dull collection of outdated articles. A real disappointment from the author of works like [Faster!]and [Chaos].
    • 3/5
      A good, interesting read - many of the earlier essays/articles are quite amusing - but I found the focus to be quite narrow, and the issues addressed quite limited. Much attention was focused on the issues of identity and anonymity, however, as a young woman who's been using the internet for more years than I probably should admit, I found the issues of anonymity and privacy with regards to safety, harrassment and crime, both in the real world and online, direly lacking. Anyone who's been stalked via the developing technologies in the past decade will know what I mean. The other focus was very much on money - and fair enough, it seems to be what makes the world go 'round, really, but sometimes a little dry. Mobile technology was also a heavily featured topic as well.All up, pretty good, though with some glaring ommissions - others may have more of an appreciation of this book than I.