Customer Reviews

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bilton's book is the latest in a line of prognostication about how technology will impact the future. When you read, start with the manifesto-like epilogue that strangely should have started the book. I don't wonder if that change would have given the book a more impassioned start. Bilton starts to gain steam about halfway through, his chapter on suggestion and swarms being my favorite and ends with both commentary on various segments of media and reporting on some of the protoyping he did while working in the New York Times R&D lab. Technophiles will be similarly frustrated by the early going but rewarded for sticking with it.

Nick Bilton's "I Live in the Future, and Here's How It Works" reads as a mildly contained love letter, not so much to any one particular media device, but rather evolving technology as a whole. His "Bites, Snacks and Meals" model describes us as a society of "anchoring communities" who is constantly being tapped on the proverbial shoulder with a new and uniquely convenient way to consume media in all its forms. Bilton recalls societal fears that this influx of media and mountains of information will both shatter our focus and ruin friendships. He goes on to compare them to the same rampant illogical fears that were abound during the advent of the train and telephone, and does so rather cohesively.

Bilton also writes in great detail about social networking sites such as Facebook and Foursquare turning into daily routines, the porn industry being online revolutionaries in the "pay to play" model and the ever-changing landscape of social media and how it affects us in ways we may not realize. Bilton is ahead of the curve here and that's fairly obvious.

Regarding the revolution of print media, Bilton says, "The world is shifting. Ignoring it won't make it go away." Standing steadfastly against this ignorance, Bilton embraces everything from iPads to Playstations, citing a particular study showing that surgeons displayed better precision who were avid video game players. He also debunks the belief that virtual interaction will ruin language by reducing words to a series of abbreviated letters, poignantly detailing certain examples of English words that have shortened over time- omnibus/bus, public house/pub. In other words, changes in language are habitual and therefore, natural. He brings up opposing arguments and readily shoots them down with facts.

If you're a Generation Y, "I grew up with a computer and can't remember life without it" type person, you'll generally find yourself nodding along as you read this and relate (or have it read to you on a mobile device), finding a kinship with an author who clearly and admittedly grew up as a gadget geek. If you don't know a bit from a byte, this book serves as a fine overview of where we've been and where we're headed in the ongoing evolution of daily communication and information dissemination.

I did enjoy this book. It was comfortable, covering a bunch of concepts I'd been thinking about. That said, it wasn't necessarily earth-shattering for me. I felt like there was nothing absolutely new here, but rather an overview for members of the publishing industry, or elder people who weren't spending a ton of time online and maybe weren't aware of how people were getting news online these days.

I bought the book because I assumed by its title that it will be a clever analysis of how the near future (next 5 years) will look like, evaluating trends and things to notice and maybe make sure that we're part of on a business level.

But the book was less about the "I live in the future and this is how it looks" and much more about the sub-title "Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted". The review of different current trends is nice for someone who's not involved in this fields already. So if the book wasn't called "I live in the future" it would be a good description of what it is and I'd probably wouldn't have been as disappointed.

So if you're looking for future trends this isn't the book for you (there are just a few highlights in that regard). If you're looking for some overview of the current trends then this is good enough.

This book is for those who want to understand how the next couple decades will be like regarding technology and storytelling, while reviewing the causes and effects in history and applying such cases to the present and the future. It's not exactly a "futurology" book, but rather a well-polished product that discusses how we are adapting to the changing/innovative technology and where it's all heading towards. For example, Nick Bilton offers a glimpse into the near past where media dominated the entertainment industry with newspapers, magazines, radio, tv, and movie theaters, where consumers paid for the content. Then he brings us back to the present where the entertainment industry is drastically gravitating towards digital media, in which consumers pay for the experience, not just the content. Reading into this was an eye-opener for me.

For me, personally, I have already thought a lot about the ideas presented in this book beforehand, so it wasn't all new to me; it was still a great read, however. I highly recommend it.

Overall I enjoyed Nick Bilton's book. It was thought provoking. As the title suggests Nick uses himself as a protagonist who lives in the future. One quote in the book explains this concept: "The future is already here - it is just evenly distributed" - William Gibson. Being a technology researcher and blogger for the New York Times, the author is an extreme early adopter who's job is to have a running commentary as he goes. He's experiencing technologies today that your average user only experiences much later (and only if it takes off). Much of the book presents arguments in favour of technology to counter negative claims against it.

In a nod to the subject, I tweeted my thoughts while reading the book on the train to work in the mornings. You can see the tweets by typing the following search string in Google: "site:twitter.com #ILiveInFuture".

The single most interesting point I found in the book I summarized in the following tweet:

"@nickbilton #ILiveInFuture New technology overwhelming our brains? Like written words did? Letters and words were also invented by man."

Almost everyone references Gutenberg when discussing disruptive technologies, but before reading #ILiveInFuture it has never occurred to me that the written word is a man-made invention. How would the technology naysayers cope if "technology" included their beloved written word? (a means to many of their livelihoods).

This isn't a book of answers; reading this book is a good way to get caught up the latest technologies, and stimulate your own thinking about their impact.

It reads as long NY Times article and even though there is lots of interesting research mentioned it does not say anything really surprising. But what is great about the book is its optimism and openness to the new. Basically it says that our world is changing and even though this transition might be bumpy there is no need to worry. We have been there before and change is good. It turned me in to a techno-optimist, at least now in a days after reading it. I would definitely recommend it. And it was a first book I bought on my Kindle - impulse buy after I read an article in NY Times about it on my Kindle while traveling in a city tram.

Nick's book is every bit as good as his writing as the lead technology writer for the Bits section. It's a hell of a read - fast paced and keeps you glued; perfect for a plane or a beach.

There's just one great lie about this book: that it's about the future. I almost didn't read it for that reason - guesses about the future are wrong so often that you might as well just read science fiction. But that's not what the author's writing about. He tells us about the present, speeding by us at 100 mph. From the opening admission that he no longer reads his own paper (at least not on paper) to the cautionary ending, this is only about the future insofar as you're not keeping up with the present.

And this present is a delight indeed.

I've been a fan of Nick's writing on the New York Times' 'bits' blog for some time. His first book doesn't disappoint.

It takes along and broad view of how technology is changing culture and, in particular, media. It looks at the important 'slow' impact and delivers some important thinking in a provocative, fun wrtiting style that moves at a good clip. I devoured the book in one flight.

Alongside Shirky's 'Cognitive Surplus' and Kevin Kelly's forthcoming 'What Technology Wants' this is one of three important books this year that gives us a better map of the impact of technology. Well worth a read.

Throughout this book, I felt as though Bilton was writing primarily to the "digital immigrants" he describes as people who lived before the current tech boom and may struggle with the transition. He draws upon past research in psychology and sociology as well as the history of technology to explain both how and why the changes in the last 20 years are unmitigated progress. Readers who have embraced these changes may find this book to be a rallying point but probably won't find lots of new insights. As a digital immigrant, I did find the book to be a helpful tool in reflecting on how I integrate new technology in my life and dealing with the overwhelming feeling of trying to consume everything. I found the introduction, the chapter on anchoring communities, and the chapter on individual economics the most interesting. The rest seemed too engaged in a debate I'm not a part of. Can people multi-task and be productive? Will facebook and twitter ruin young minds? I know people are still debating these points, but it seems fruitless to devote so much of the book to this since, as Bilton so thoroughly points out, nearly everyone under the age of 50 is already multi-tasking and living in the future he describes. Further, Bilton seems too stuck on moralizing about technology and insisting that it is basically good in defense of those who suggest it is basically bad. That being said, I'd recommend this book to anyone who is stuck in that way of thinking and the above mentioned chapters to those already living in Bilton's future.