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Friday, June 19, 2009
Tech vet Dan Bricklin's new book puts blogosphere in context
By Bill Siegel, Special to Mass High Tech
MHT's Galen Moore: New 'hyperlocal' web trend
MHT's Efrain Viscarolasaga: How social networking is changing business
MHT Editor Doug Banks on NECN: How companies are using social media
BOOK REVIEW: “BRICKLIN ON TECHNOLOGY”
Dan Bricklin (Wiley Publishing, Inc.; 2009)
Weighing in at 498 pages (including a 22-page index), there is a definite “thud factor” to Dan Bricklin’s On Technology, a collection based on Bricklin’s blogs on a wide variety of technology-related subjects.
Early on, and near the end of the book, Bricklin, co-creator of Visicalc, admits to his obssession with detail: “On any topic, you can explore deeply and find nuance.”
Nuances abound. We get to see, in engrossing detail, how people and societies interact with technology and how they affect each other.
The lenses of Bricklin’s microscope focus on sociology, history, culture and individual humans. Topics range from the American Revolution to PC history, from tools he suggests be developed to those evolved over decades.
He ties together 10 years of blogs with a narrative that puts them into perspective. Blogs are primarily a person’s thoughts in the present; perspective comes from assessing the value and relevance of yesterday’s thoughts. By putting his blogs into historical and sociological contexts, Bricklin makes the evolution of his own ideas part of the story.
One basic theme is how technology enables us to communicate. His questions give us pause: What drives technology’s evolution? How much will people pay for new technology? What does it mean that technology represents a whole new class of tool?
For example, the recording industry’s reaction (or non-reaction) to technologies that allowed college students to develop peer-to-peer (P2P) applications like Napster and its cousins. While the big labels were busy with their model of eliminating competition by absorbing them through acquisition, the Napsters, Kazaas, Gnutellas, and similar P2P applications were changing the way music was distributed. By the time record companies caught on, it was almost too late — P2P applications were popping up like a “Whack-a-Mole” game; because Napster was the most popular and most successful, it was the first to feel the wrath of the corporate armies.
Bricklin also looks at the sudden rise of blogging, once considered little more than Internet-based diaries, personal journals, or “cyber chatterboxes.” But bloggers at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 made the world sit up and pay attention to this new paradigm in news and information sharing. Some bloggers may still be chatterboxes, but it became obvious that the instant sharing of news introduced a revolutionary media landscape.
In chunks and bites of real-time news, the younger, technology-savvy generation scared the living daylights out of conventional news media. Bloggers reached millions of people as the news was happening, threatening to make same-day news programs and newspapers obsolete. Some newspapers and television news programs are still reeling from this assault, while others have adapted to the plethora of blogging sites like hungry bears waking up from hibernation. (The Boston Globe, for instance, links to more than 50 blogs from its op-ed section.)
Bricklin also looks at the 30-plus years that PCs have steadily, even unobtrusively, cast a widening net over our personal and business lives. As he sees it, the PC and its offspring, rather than remaining static and restricted in their use, continually adapt to users’ changing needs and demands, ranging from entertainment to accessing a wider information base than would have been believed possible (or even useful) just a few years ago.
And it ends with an ironic twist: With thousands of websites abandoned every day, leaving behind a rat’s nest of old links bringing up the dreaded “Error 404: Site Not Found,” Bricklin discovers something better than Internet technology to preserve and share his thoughts. He circles back to the beginning of mass communication: Printed books. Not even the newest of technologies can escape the one non-technological truth of existence: life is circular, what goes around comes around, returning itself — and us — to the roots of communication.
Bill Siegel is a freelance writer living in southern New Hampshire. He has worked in the high-tech industry since the mid-1970s, and still does a double-take at 2-gigabyte memory sticks mixed in with chewing gum, chocolate bars and other items at supermarket cash registers.
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