Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet (English Edition)

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		Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet (English Edition)
		Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet (English Edition)

In Overconnected, Bill Davidow, a former Silicon Valley executive, explains how the almost miraculous success of the Internet Web has also created a unique set of hazards, in effect overconnecting us, with the direst of consequences for our political, economic, and day-to-day lives.

The practical applications of this new medium—not least among them the ability to borrow money, invest in the stock market, or buy a new home—have made it a force unequaled in scope or impact in our daily lives. But the luxuries of the connected age have taken on a momentum all of their own, ultimately becoming the root cause of the recent financial meltdown from which the world is now still struggling to recover.

 

By meticulously and counter-intuitively anatomizing how being overconnected tends to create systems of positive feedback that have largely negative consequences, Davidow explains everything from the recent subprime-mortgage crisis to the meltdown of Iceland, from the loss of people’s privacy to the spectacular fall of the stock market that forced the Federal Government to rescue institutions supposedly “too big to fail.” All because we were so miraculously wired together!

 

Explaining how such symptoms of Internet connection as unforeseeable accidents and thought contagions acted to accelerate the downfall and make us permanently vulnerable to catastrophe, Davidow places our recent experience in historical perspective and offers a set of practical steps to minimize similar disasters in the future.

 

Original, commonsensical and historically informed, Overconnected indentifies problems we live with that are now so large, omnipresent and part of our daily lives that few people have even noticed them.

网友对Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet (English Edition)的评论

First, Davidow's "Marketing High Technology" is a personal top 5 business selection. It provides a powerful insiders view of technical marketing with exceptional working first hand examples and bold (but well documented) theories. So perhaps my expectations of "Overconnected" were too lofty. That said, even objectively this work falls far short of properly examining such a bold premise. A better title for this book would be "Superconnected" and the subtitle should be reexamined as well.

Unfortunately this book cannot determine if it wants to be overtly scholarly or pleasantly anecdotal. Even within paragraphs the book seems to switch back and forth. The book is not well organized and details too well the distant past at the expense the recent past like the subprime meltdown.

I certainly see intrigue in Davidow's premise and some items are well covered. The book does in fact lend some insight to compounding of errors by internet tools. However I am disappointed that Davidow as a technologist did not see that many specific issues could be addressed by technologists with the correct corporate and governmental oversight. The stronger point that Davidow makes is actually the compounded emotional frenzy that a high level of connection can cause. Although he addresses and defines it there is really no insightful discussion about social causes and issues can be both inflated and solved.

When Davidow wrote Marketing HT he was recently a leader in that field. Currently he is a venture capitalist. Sadly a book on that subject would have been much more insightful... Save your money on this one.

This book is an excellent survey of historical examples of connectivity gone-wild. It was enlightening to read that our current challenges with the internet are not new. Instead, nothing is new under the sun, it's just the methods that change. The book did such a good job of correlating todays internet to the past, that the author really should have just left it there. Unfortunately, the author dives into his own ideas of what will help prevent the internet poison of overconnectivity. Somewhere along the way the author chimes in on global warming advocating European-style taxation of Co2 emissions. He also encourages government regulation, more regulations and taxation to help prevent another currency melt-down. To solve the problem of spam and internet viruses, he considers the impact of charging a fee per email.
While I appreciate his ideas to help save the world, they are a weak conclusion in his very rather unbiased take on historical overconnectivity. Instead of providing personal perspectives about global warming and the need for further government control, he should stick with trying to convince innovators to account for positive feedback in systems they design.
Maybe his next book will be about how government, the IMF and the federal reserve are the worst positive feedback loops that exist. He could also account for the ways government positive feedback loops crush liberty, especially when checks-and-balances are ignored. Trusting in government to solve positive feedback loops is like letting the pigs run the farm (read Animal Farm by George Orwell). But, who needs the farm when we have the internet.

I found this book very interesting, thought provoking as well as pretty well documented. As A bit of a Luddite about new technology I could be biased.I suppose that is true of a sizable amount of those in my age group. My bias is not one of navigating a web site, learning a new OS, downloading or anything of that nature. I am however cautious and genuinely concerned of the loss of face to face communication where Simile, metaphor, innuendo and body language are essentially absent. I am not pleased with the advent of reporting one's whereabouts, activities and company publicly, nor with the ability to type with ones thumbs. The underlying and also poignant text of this book are worth reading I would recommend it to all age groups. As always the message and importance of it may be lost to those with closed minds.

There were economic crises long before the Internet existed, but the Internet has created an environment where crises are more frequent and more powerful. Like a strong wind blowing over a wildfire, the hyper-connectivity fostered by the Internet exacerbates, expands and accelerates small incidents, turning them in to major events.

This is the theory that drives William Davidow's latest book, "OVERconnected: The promise and Threat of the Internet." Davidow argues that economic bubbles, manias and crashes as the result of thought contagions-- ideas that spread like diseases. The more highly connected the environment, the faster and further ideas can spread. If an idea spreads far enough it may begins self- reinforcing and spin out of control, driving the economic system faster and faster in one direction. This is known as a positive feedback loop.

In the past, the government or cultural institutions of a society could intervene to slow or stop a run-away feedback loop. But in the current over-connected environment, changes are so rapid that these institutions are overwhelmed and unable to cope. As a result, the entire global economic system is more crises prone than ever before.

Davidow provides a dozens of historical examples of how positive feedback loops create economic crises. He then explores how the interdependencies spawned by the Internet contributed to the 2008 economic meltdown in Iceland and the United States. He briefly touches on how the Internet has threatened consumer privacy, enabled the outsourcing of American jobs, and destroyed the printed newspaper industry. And finally, he proposes several possible solutions to lessen the economic risks associated with over-connectivity and the Internet.

While OVERconnected is at time thought provoking, I would not recommend it as an exploration of the internets impact on crises. Davidow's theories are compelling but poorly presented. The book includes too much irrelevant information and is poorly organized and poorly written.

Davidow spends chapter after chapter expounding upon definitions and explaining ideas that are only loosely related to his thesis. Rather than picking a few strong examples of crises over history, he includes pages and pages of information on every crisis from the 1630's tulip boom to the 2000 tech bubble. Rather than organizing historical examples chronologically or by topic, they are scattered haphazardly throughout the book.

All in all, less than 50 percent of the book is actually devoted to supporting his theory that the Internet creates a crisis-prone environment. Davidow barely addresses the economic risks posed by automated stock trading systems and skims over the impact of social media in spreading thought contagions. He offers no suggestions of how the Internet may contribute to crises in the future. Meanwhile, he devotes countless pages to the history of the refrigerated train car, the development of the American steel industry, the impact of the Model-T ford, and his own personal life and experiences.

OVERconnected offers sound theory, but is undone by the authors attempt to include too much information. Had Davidow focused more on supporting his primary thesis-- that the Internet expatiates and exacerbates crises--he could have produced a very different and much stronger book.

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