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Title details for Overconnected by William H. Davidow - Available

Overconnected

The Promise and Threat of the Internet

by William H. Davidow
ebook
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“Shows how the unanticipated effects of the Internet are distorting economics, politics, international relations, and individual lives” (James Fallows).
In Overconnected, Bill Davidow, a former Silicon Valley executive, explains how the almost miraculous success of the Internet 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—not least among them the ability to borrow money, invest in the stock market, or buy a new home—have made a great 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 a financial meltdown from which much of 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 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 4, 2011

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781453211106

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781453211106
      • File size: 1146 KB

  • Accessibility

    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

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    • No information about appearance modifiability is available.

    • Not all of the content will be readable as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.

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  • Languages

    • English

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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