Books

Jill Abramson on the growing pains of digital whizzkids

Jill Abramson’s book, Merchants of Truth: Inside the News Revolution is mostly a story of four news organisations during these past two decades of media upheaval, says Philip Delves Broughton. The news business has been caught in an endless whirlwind ever since the arrival of the internet. Newspapers have seen their traditional business models collapse and only a few have figured out ways to survive, let alone thrive. All that juicy advertising money which once sent correspondents overseas and covered bar tabs around the world has long since been sucked up by the remorseless machines of Silicon Valley. Jill Abramson stood briefly at the centre of this chaos. As editor of The New York Times from 2011 to 2014, the first woman to hold the position, her tenure ended in a managerial dust-up involving the Times’ digital strategy. She was scuppered, she alleges, by the duplicity of Mark Thompson, former director-general of the BBC , who had been appointed chief executive. “Smart as an Oxford don and proud of it,” she writes of her loathed British overlord. “With a shadow of facial stubble and reddish hair, his casual dress concealed a command-and-control ferocity.” His English accent, she says, intimidated the paper’s owners. Despite this flash of professional score-settling, though, Abramson’s book is mostly a story of four news organisations during these past two decades of media upheaval, two old, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and two new, Vice and BuzzFeed. The travails of newspapers are well known, and Abramson does a thorough job of describing the contortions at The Times and The Post. Not so long ago senior editors would leave meetings if business issues were raised. It would have been unthinkable to have technologists sitting on the newsroom floor monitoring web traffic. Yet, here we are, with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owning […]

If you can read this headline, you can read a novel.

Judith SeaboyerSenior Lecturer, The University of Queensland Public anxiety about the capacity of digital-age children and young adults to read anything longer than a screen grab has come to feel like moral panic. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest we must take such unease seriously. In 2016, the US National Endowment for the Arts reported the proportion of American adults who read at least one novel in 2015 had dropped to 43.1% from 56.9% in 1982. In 2018, a US academic reported that in 1980, 60% of 18-year-old school students read a book, newspaper or magazine every day that wasn’t assigned for school. By 2016, the number had plummeted to 16%. Those same 12th graders reported spending “six hours a day texting, on social media and online”. American literacy expert and neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes the threat screen reading poses to our capacity for “the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading”. She asks: Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves? But rather than taking up defensive positions on either side of the digital-analogue reading divide, Wolf encourages us to embrace both. As parents and teachers we can help our children develop a bi-literate reading brain. There are several ways we can do this. Reading pathways Reading is a learned skill that requires the development of particular neural networks. And different reading platforms encourage the development of different aspects of those networks. Screen-reading children, immersed from toddlerhood in the pleasures and instant gratification of skimming, clicking and linking, develop cognitive skills that make them adept power browsers, good at the useful ability to scan […]

Blowout: Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All

by Rachel Maddow Rachel Maddow’s Blowout offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humour, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe—from Oklahoma City to Siberia to Equatorial Guinea—exposing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas. She shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the United States, and the West’s most important alliances. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, but ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson emerge as two of the past century’s most consequential corporate villains. The oil-and-gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.” This book is a clarion call to contain the lion: to stop subsidising the wealthiest industry on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of predatory oil executives and their enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

The Library Book

by Susan Orlean On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realised this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerising and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries across the country and around the world, from their humble beginnings as a metropolitan charitable initiative to their current status as a cornerstone of national identity; brings each department of the library to vivid life through on-the-ground reporting; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; reflects on her own experiences in libraries; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. Along the way, Orlean introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters from libraries past and present—from Mary Foy, who in 1880 at eighteen years old […]

Zucked:Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

By Roger McNamee This is the dramatic story of how a noted tech venture capitalist, an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and investor in his company, woke up to the serious damage Facebook was doing to our society and set out to try to stop it.If you had told Roger McNamee three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying democracy, he would have howled with laughter. He had mentored many tech leaders in his illustrious career as an investor, but few things had made him prouder, or been better for his fund’s bottom line, than his early service to Mark Zuckerberg. Still a large shareholder in Facebook, he had every good reason to stay on the bright side. Until he simply couldn’t. Zucked is McNamee’s intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the world’s most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing. It’s a story that begins with a series of rude awakenings. First there is the author’s dawning realisation that the platform is being manipulated by some very bad actors. Then there is the even more unsettling realisation that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are unable or unwilling to share his concerns, polite as they may be to his face. And then comes Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and the emergence of one horrific piece of news after another about the malign ends to which the Facebook platform has been put. To McNamee’s shock, Facebook’s leaders still duck and dissemble, viewing the matter as a public relations problem. Now thoroughly alienated, McNamee digs into the issue, and fortuitously meets up with some fellow travellers who share his concerns, and help him sharpen its focus. Soon he and a dream team of Silicon Valley […]

The Innovators Dilemma

– by Clayton M. Christensen What do the Honda Supercub, Intel’s 8088 processor, and hydraulic excavators have in common? In The Innovator’s Dilemma they are all examples of disruptive technologies that helped to redefine the competitive landscape of their respective markets. These products did not come about as the result of successful companies carrying out sound business practices in established markets. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, author Clayton M. Christensen shows how these and other products cut into the low end of the marketplace and eventually evolved to displace high-end competitors and their reigning technologies. At the heart of The Innovator’s Dilemma is how a successful company with established products keeps from being pushed aside by newer, cheaper products that will, over time, get better and become a serious threat. Christensen writes that even the best-managed companies, in spite of their attention to customers and continual investment in new technology, are susceptible to failure no matter what the industry, be it hard drives or consumer retailing. Succinct and clearly written. The Innovator’s Dilemma is an important book that belongs on every manager’s bookshelf.

Basket Agriculture Asia Adult Bicycle Beautiful

The Hillary Doctrine: Sex & American Foreign Policy

by Valerie M. Hudson and Patricia Leidl Given that much of the political science literature on women, gender, and U.S. foreign policy has primarily examined the legislative branch and public opinion, The Hillary Doctrine’s focus on the executive branch is an important and welcome contribution to the international relations field. Hudson and Leidl focus on Hillary Clinton’s prioritisation of women’s empowerment in all facets of U.S. foreign policy and national security during her tenure as secretary of state in the Obama administration, noting that “she was (and is) the world’s most influential and eloquent exponent of the proposition that the situation of women and the destiny of nations are integrally linked” (pp. xiii). The authors make clear, however, that the book is not about Hillary Clinton herself but about the Doctrine as an idea translated into policy, and hence their “foundational question” is as follows: “Do the situation, security, and status of women within a nation affect that nation’s security, stability, and prosperity? If so, then the premise of the Hillary Doctrine is sound, and warrants a prominent place in U.S. foreign policy” (p. 68). Building on Hudson’s previous work and the work of others demonstrating the strong link between women’s security and national security, and drawing on theory and extensive empirical research (interviews, field work, quantitative analysis, and detailed case studies), the authors examine the origins and implementation of the Hillary Doctrine. In her address to the UN Commission on the Status of Women in March 2010, Clinton first articulated what eventually became known as the Hillary Doctrine, stating that “the subjugation of women is a threat to the national security of the United States.” The Doctrine was officially included in the State Department’s first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review of U.S. foreign policy, published in December 2010 (p. […]

Book Review:The Ethical Economy

The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, by Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen, Columbia University Press, 2013 The Ethical Economy introduces two major intellectuals mapping the transition from early industrial manufacturing and its economics based on objects (things you can drop on your foot) to today’s information economies where intellectual property, intangibles, brands and reputation are the new source of value. Authors Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen join Don Tapscott, Yoichi Benkler, Michel Bauwens and others in mapping this new economic terrain where information offers non-rival “win-win” opportunities for abundance through sharing and cooperation (if you give me information, you still retain it as well). Following Yoichi Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics, Chris Anderson’s Makers and Michel Bauwens’ peer-to-peer sharing models (P2P Foundation), Arvidsson and Peitersen, both seasoned professionals in business and finance, delve deeper into the implications of this tectonic shift beyond the cover story in The Economist and recent books including Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ Collaborative Consumption and Lorna Gold’s The Sharing Economy to examine the role of technology, the internet, social media, the maker revolution, prosumers, crowdsourcing and “productive publics” and the socialisation of value creation. This is deeply researched, heady stuff enfolding insights from behavioral science, brand management, ethical investing and the growing importance of reputational risks and benefits. Mainstream economics and financial models are left behind in their material focus on competitive rival goods and assumptions of scarcity. The rise of this global informational, internet-based economy of social media, open-source, crowdsourcing by over 3 billion ever-more connected, interacting humans is a new economy of the commons – based largely on “publics” and their opinions, infrastructure resources and shared knowledge. This fuels the skepticism toward corporations, banks, governments and erodes trust in older norm-creating institutions, academia and religious […]

Book Review: Heartfulness -Beyond Mindfulness-Finding Your Real Life

Dr Stephen McKenzie Released by Exile publishing comes a truly inspiring book which we all ought to read to help find a little more peace in our lives. Dont we all need that and to make the world a better place to be in? Dr Stephen McKenzie looks at the lived examples of such luminnaires as Nelson Mandela to show how he lived with heartfulness in his truly difficult life. Heartfulness can help us move away from being so self-possessed and singularly focussed in these times of high social technology interaction – without seeing the smile of the other person on the computer or mobile phone! The mindfulness trend has seen mindfulness become valued more as an item in a personal toolkit as opposed to a full way of living. Dr Stephen McKenzie is a leading mindfulness author and teacher and he brings us back to its roots –—connecting the heart with mindfulness to become heartfulness. The paths to full living are clearly shown and demonstrated. Being heartful simply means being fully connected — with ourselves and with other people — and therefore fully alive, happy, without stress and at peace. There are exercises for the reader and chapters include adversity, humour, knowledge, kindness, love and hope, among others. With anecdotes, things to do and think about and lots to gently read and enjoy, this is a gentle warm book that seeks to bring the reader home to a happy state. As a researcher, lecturer and writer with years of clinical and teaching experience in many areas of psychology, Dr Stephen McKenzie has written several books including Exisle’s Mindfulness at Work and with Craig Hassed, Mindfulness for Life. Dr McKenzie lectures in psychology at Melbourne’s Monash University.

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