What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier

by James Gleick

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375421777
• ISBN13: 9780375421778
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 301 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Funny and thoughtful, but somewhat outdated

I found myself keeping a list of all the things that he overemphasized, like modems, or the things he completely did not anticipate, like Google and Wikipedia. It was just too hard to remember what life was like in the 1990s without feeling a tinge of boredom. Still, I found the book funny in some places, and I applaud his thoughtfulness and willingness to be skeptical about technology. Many science and technology writers talk about certain inventions as if they're the greatest things, like we should accept a refrigerator that knows what's inside it and will reorder milk automatically with no question. Not so Gleick, he's frequently suspicious of the social consequences of our addiction to microprocessors and the internet. Privacy, identity and individual freedom weigh heavily in this book.

Read it Soon , it is becoming more of a History Book every Day

A book about the Information Age that is of course becoming dated every day, but still a rewarding book to read. A book that forces a reader often in the midst of a daily struggles with technology to take a step back and review the progress that has been made when one is often so close too the action to appreciate it. The author gives a little overview to show the overall plan of the technology and where it is headed, and discusses some very interesting ideas, such a cyber-dollars. Money that would be good only for internet purchases, only if people will have enough faith in an internet monetary system. The book is a collection of previously published articles by the author. The book is easy to read, thought provoking when discussing the future, and his summaries of the recent past remind the reader of the progress being made in just a years of the information age. Well worth reading.

Readable retrospective on the nineties in technology

It's usually a good sign when picking up a collection of essays to find that they have been previously published in some noted periodical such as The New Yorker or Harper's or in this case (with one exception) from The New York Times Magazine. Gleick's focus in these thirty highly polished essays is information and especially the Internet and how the Internet and related technology are changing our lives. There is a personal, and an "I lived it" quality to the writing that I found engaging.Author of the challenging Chaos and the very long and adoring Genius about physicist Richard Feynman and the more recent Faster, here Gleick gives us short and easy to appreciate recollections of the communications revolution. His observations are trenchant, mildly apocalyptic and/or gee-whizzed, amusing and very well expressed. Having good editors is something Gleick says he has been blessed with, and in these pieces it shows. This attractive book is simply a pleasure to read.The first piece is from 1992 about the bugs in software, in particular those in Microsoft's Word for Windows; and I want to tell you even though (or especially because) I use WordPerfect, I identified. I felt the aggravation. Gleick notes that software is unlike any other product in its complexity, an observation that no doubt pleases Microsoft's software engineers. However, he reports that Microsoft, unable to cope with the bugs munching on their code and unable or unwilling to excise them, came to an accommodation with the world by declaring that "It's not a bug--it's a feature," while compiling an in-company list of known bugs dubbed, "Won't Fix."And then, I guess, had lunch.My favorite essay in the collection is the one entitled "The End of Cash" beginning on page 143 in which Gleick notes among other things that issuers of digital cash cards expect to "profit generally from lost cards." He adds that "telephone companies and transit systems already figure gains ranging from 1 percent to a phenomenal 10 percent." (p. 152) This is an example of privatized "escheatment," an aptly named phenomenon in which governments have traditionally benefitted from lost coins and paper money, or people dying without heirs. Gleick reports that billions of pennies "simply vanish from the economy each year" which he cites as a "hidden cost of money." (pp. 157-158) But credit cards too have their hidden costs. They amount to a tax on those who do not use credit cards (basically the poor) because "the credit card companies have mostly succeeded in forbidding merchants to offer discounts for cash purchases." (So everybody buying the product shares the credit card transaction costs.)Gleick also looks into the changes that a cashless society will bring, noting what kinds of crime will no longer be worth doing (e.g., kidnaping for ransom, armed robbery.) He reflects on the phenomenon of "float" in which digital money can be used by financial institutions to earn interest for themselves. Gleick

An Unexpected Pleasure

This book wasn't what I expected. As [the] editorial review explains, but the book description only hints at, this is a collection of previously published work. Since I read the latter, but not the former, I was expecting a retrospective analysis of the .com bubble. Because of the rapid rate of obsolescence of most things written about the Internet, I don't think I would have bought the book had I known that parts of it were written as long as a decade ago, but I'm glad I did anyway.Looking back with the benefit of hindsight at things written about the Internet over the course of the last decade proves to be an illuminating exercise. It definitely seems to be a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Some of the things that have changed a lot since the time the original articles were published are:* Everyone knows what the Internet is (in his introduction, Gleick explains that in the early `90s, editors made him explain this when he used the term in articles). One of the really interesting things I learned reading the book is that the original development of the Web only dates back to 1989.* In a 1993 article, he describes people being annoyed by mobile phones ringing in airports. Given the far less appropriate places they ring today, that seems positively quaint.* In 1993, some people remembered who Dan Quayle was and cared enough to create a newsgroup devoted to making fun of him. Some current issues that the book demonstrates have a much longer history are:* Concerns about bandwidth and information privacy (or more accurately, lack thereof). * Password overload (described in amusing detail in a 1995 column).* The incomprehensibility of software and Web site user agreements - even to those who bother to read them.As an added bonus, since it was written as technologies were emerging, the book provides the full name of things that are now only known by their acronyms. For instance, I've never known what ISDN stands for, but now I know that it's `Integrated Services Digital Network.'With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that some of Gleick's predictions were very prescient (e.g. the Y2K anti-climax), while others were less accurate or at least premature (e.g. cash becoming obsolete). All in all, the book provides a very enjoyable look through the rearview mirror.

An enjoyable visit to our technological past...

I've read Gleick's Faster, and when I saw What Just Happened in the bookstore, I picked it up immediately. Gleick's candid analyses of technological triumphs is an enjoyable walk through the computer and Internet revolution of the 1990s; however, the book was lacking some of the critical interprative edge that one finds in Faster, and for that reason it fell a little short of my expectations. Although What Just Happened does offer an opportunity to step back and think about the implications of the IT revolution, I found myself reading it more for entertainment.