Techie Book Store

Technology, Philosophy, and Psychology Readings

Debates in the Digital Humanities Matthew K. Gold	You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Vintage)Jaron Lanier	Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now [Kindle Edition] Douglas Rushkoff	The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath (Available April 23, 2013) Nicco Mele
Digital humanities, such as new technologies, research methods, and opportunities for collaborative scholarship and open-source peer review are transforming the liberal arts. The innovative ways that they allow for sharing knowledge and teaching is also transforming the university. Digital humanities programs have been able to hire new faculty, establish new centers and initiatives, and attract multimillion-dollar grants at a time when traditional university programs are facing deep budget cuts.	Lanier, a computer scientist, who was instrumental in the development of virtual reality, opens a broad discussion about technical and cultural problems that stem from our programming choices in the creation of the Internet and hypothesizes what a future based on the current design philosophies that are built into the system might bring. His discussion is highly relevant in the high tech world, filled with social networks, cloud-based systems and tools, and Web 2.0 designs. He cautions against losing the insight of the individual to the mob mentality and use of computer algorithms.	According to Douglas Rushkoff, “presentism” is the new ethos of a society that’s always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blends the past and future into a mash-up of instantaneous experience.	“Unless we exercise deliberate moral choice over the design and use of technologies,” Mele says, “we doom ourselves to a future that tramples human values, renders social structures chaotic, and destroys rather than enhances freedom.”

The Future of Technology

Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization (TED Books)[Kindle Edition] Parag Khanna, Ayesha Khanna	Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 Michio Kaku	Who Owns the Future? (Available May 7, 2013) Jaron Lanier
Ayesha and Parag Khanna, technology futurists, each named as one of the 75 people who will influence the 21st century by <i>Esquire</i> assert that we are evolving with technology. According to the Khanna’s we are moving from a point of co-existence with technology to a phase of co-evolution with it. This is what is known as the Hybrid Age. In this environment, technology does not simply process instructions; it has its own agency, and we respond to it as much as it responds to us. The book develops a discussion of how this will impact the world and how we will adapt to meet the evolutionary expectation.	Space elevators. Internet-enabled contact lenses. Cars that fly by floating on magnetic fields. This is the stuff of science fiction—it’s also daily life in the year 2100. Renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku details the developments in computer technology, artificial intelligence, medicine, space travel, and more, that are poised to happen over the next hundred years.	Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries—from media to medicine to manufacturing—we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth. But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. The book charts the path toward a new information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.

Biographies of Super Awesome People

Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson	Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American Richard S. Tedlow	In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives Steven Levy	The Chip : How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution T.R. Reid
Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: Personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.	Andy Grove survived both the Nazis and the Communists to become the quintessential American capitalist. Any short list of the world’s most admired business people would include Andy Grove, the chairman and CEO of Intel in its years of explosive growth. During his career, Intel became the model for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley became the model for the world. And Grove became Time’s Man of the Year-an icon of the promise of the American life.	Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters — the Googleplex — to show how Google works.	Barely 50 years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vastly expensive thing that only a handful of scientists had ever seen. The world’s brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.

The Drama of Social Media

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal Ben Mezrich	The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media Jose van Dijck	The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World David Kirkpatrick
Best friends Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg had spent many lonely nights looking for a way to stand out among Harvard University’s elite, competitive, and accomplished student body. Then, in 2003, Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard’s computers, crashed the campus network, almost got himself expelled, and was inspired to create Facebook, the social networking site that has since revolutionized communication around the world.	Social media: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and many other platforms define daily habits of communication and creative production. This book studies the rise of social media, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media.	It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects—even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.

The Billion Dollar Business of Tech

Decoding Big Data: The corporate race to turn information into profit [Kindle Edition] Financial Times	“Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron Lisa Gitelman	Apple and Samsung: A Love Story [Kindle Edition] Jonathan Stanford Yu
Big Data: How business uses information about us. Gold mine or minefield? An unprecedented surge of data creates new opportunities for companies and changes the way they do business.	Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for astronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary “dataveillance” of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation.	Every company has a yin to its yang, and for Apple that is Samsung Electronics.

Technology’s Effect On Tomorrow’s Children

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning) Mizuko Ito	The whY Generation: Understanding How Digital Youth View Today’s Changing World Janna Prowell, Vanessa Rivero, Gabriel Rudich, Haley Bronstein, Cygne Cooper, Aashbir Grewal, Matt Herrick, Kate Ho, Evan Lester, Bridget McAnany, Kimberly Miller
Conventional wisdom about young people’s use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: Today’s teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths’ social and recreational use of digital media.	Though lacking in age, our generation contains what will be considered some of the greatest minds of all time. Though impossible to perceive in full at this very moment, our opinions still hold weight against those of an older age and even those considered everlasting for centuries.

Covered in Awesome Sauce

The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Playful Thinking series) Jesper Juul	Vintage Tomorrows: A Historian And A Futurist Journey Through Steampunk Into The Future of Technology (Comming Soon) James H. Carrott, Brian David Johnson	The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Experimental Futures) Ian Condry	A Grand Complication [Kindle Edition] Stacy Perman
Games are the art of failure: The singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.	What would today’s technology look like with Victorian-era design and materials? That’s the world steampunk envisions: A mad-inventor collection of 21st century-inspired contraptions powered by steam and driven by gears.	Author Ian Condry explores the emergence of anime, Japanese animated film and television, as a global cultural phenomenon. Drawing on ethnographic research, including interviews with artists at some of Tokyo’s leading animation studios—such as Madhouse, Gonzo, Aniplex, and Studio Ghibli—Condry discusses how anime’s fictional characters and worlds become platforms for collaborative creativity.	A biography of the world’s most expensive and most complicated timepieces ever created.

Inventors of the Future

Bunch of Amateurs: Inside America’s Hidden World of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Job Creators (Available May 14, 2013) Jack Hitt	The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Avaiable February 26, 2013) Jon Gertner	The Soul of A New MachineTracy Kidder
Author Jack Hitt pays sepecial homage to the dreams that make America what it is today and the inventors that bring those dreams to life.	In this first full portrait of the legendary Bell Labs, journalist Jon Gertner takes readers behind one of the greatest collaborations between business and science in history. Officially the research and development wing of AT&T, Bell Labs made seminal breakthroughs from the 1920s to the 1980s in everything from lasers to cellular telephony, becoming arguably the best laboratory for new ideas in the world.	Computers have changed since 1981, when Tracy Kidder memorably recorded the drama, comedy, and excitement of one company’s efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. The book explores the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the 20th century.