What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "I couldn't wait to buy Microsoft Word for Windows-rumored to be the new Cuisinart, Mack truck, and Swiss Army knife of word processing software, full-featured,..." (more)
Key Phrases: electronic village, digital cash, United States, New York, World Wide Web (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This book of previously published essays by the author of Chaos and Faster is an eclectic chronicle of the information revolution's first 10 years. "The last decade of the twentieth century came as a surprise," writes James Gleick. What Just Happened shows how surprising it was: in the book's first piece, from 1992, Gleick notes that "a relatively small number of personal computer users use Windows." (He's a good sport about it, too, poking fun at himself in an introduction for making such an obsolete observation.) A longish piece on Microsoft from 1995 seems to correct the problem when Gleick comments on "the ever-advancing boundary of Microsoft's Windows package." Then it goes on to get something really right: "Microsoft's own power poses a threat, too--the threat that comes with the self-fulfilling destiny of any monopolist." That's a prescient observation, considering the antitrust actions taken against the company since those words were written. The closing chapter of the book is fascinating and forward-looking; it's not about what just happened but what may happen. Gleick anticipates the appearance of wristwatches containing "biometric information about your loved ones, so you can see how your parents are doing." If that doesn't sound exciting enough, consider this prediction: "One can even imagine properly functional motor-vehicle offices." Now that's something to look forward to. --John Miller

From Library Journal

The expert science writer who explained Chaos to us now explains what technology has done to our lives.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (May 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375421777
• ISBN-13: 978-0375421778
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,929,865 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Unexpected Pleasure, July 7, 2002

By	Mary Ellen Gordon - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Readable retrospective on the nineties in technology, July 16, 2003

By	Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

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 observes that holders of the Yankee dollar at home and world wide (think of the large safe-deposit drawers of Arabian sheiks) are actually lending "their wealth to the United States, interest free, just as holders of American Express traveler's checks lend their money to American Express." (p. 153)

I also liked the essays on advertising ("Who Owns Your Attention") and on the growing lack of privacy ("Big Brother Is Us") and on the awesome power of Microsoft ("Making Microsoft Save for Capitalism"). There are lesser essays on political websites... web browsing ("Here Comes the Spider") and software contracts between vendor and user ("Click OK to Agree"), etc. Finally Gleick notes that we are "Inescapably Connected" and gives on page 299 a weird but telling example of how we are being transformed. We are not yet "neurons in the new world brain," he observes, yet we have gotten so much in the habit of knowing things, or at least being able to find them out that "You get a twitchy feeling that you ought to push a button and pop up the answer."

I've felt that, and soon a connecting chip may be inside my brain that really does do something like twitch as my synapses are activated by the World Wide Web.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable visit to our technological past..., June 24, 2002

By	"mhauden" (Salt Lake City, UT) - See all my reviews

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.