Overconnected The Promise and Threat of the Internet eBook William H Davidow
Download As PDF : Overconnected The Promise and Threat of the Internet eBook William H Davidow 
“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!
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.
Overconnected The Promise and Threat of the Internet eBook William H Davidow
First, Davidow's "Marketing High Technology" is a personal top 5 business selection. It provides a powerful insiders view of technical marketing with exceptional working first hand examples and bold (but well documented) theories. So perhaps my expectations of "Overconnected" were too lofty. That said, even objectively this work falls far short of properly examining such a bold premise. A better title for this book would be "Superconnected" and the subtitle should be reexamined as well.Unfortunately this book cannot determine if it wants to be overtly scholarly or pleasantly anecdotal. Even within paragraphs the book seems to switch back and forth. The book is not well organized and details too well the distant past at the expense the recent past like the subprime meltdown.
I certainly see intrigue in Davidow's premise and some items are well covered. The book does in fact lend some insight to compounding of errors by internet tools. However I am disappointed that Davidow as a technologist did not see that many specific issues could be addressed by technologists with the correct corporate and governmental oversight. The stronger point that Davidow makes is actually the compounded emotional frenzy that a high level of connection can cause. Although he addresses and defines it there is really no insightful discussion about social causes and issues can be both inflated and solved.
When Davidow wrote Marketing HT he was recently a leader in that field. Currently he is a venture capitalist. Sadly a book on that subject would have been much more insightful... Save your money on this one.
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Overconnected The Promise and Threat of the Internet eBook William H Davidow Reviews
Bill Davidow is a brilliant visionary who correctly predicted the coming of the Googles and s in his prescient book The Virtual Corporation 24 years ago. Before reading the book, I thought the Internet was 95% good or great. Davidow’s detailed analyses of the problems caused by overconnectedness have caused me to reconsider.
This is a somewhat scholarly but easily readable review of recent and more remote financial disasters in which the Internet either caused or exacerbated the events. The author is well credentialed in having been a Senior Vice President of Intel, managing the development of integrated circuits, and also being a venture capitalist intimately involved in the world of business and finance. While the book explains the intricacies of these worlds from a historical standpoint, it reads more like a novel than an academic work and clearly makes its point that the Internet, along with its obvious benefits, has provided society with a dangerous tool that has been misused in the past and has been at the root of financial crises including the market crashes of 2000 and 2008. His discovery shows that the lack of control on this wonderful tool presents a clear and present danger on many fronts. Unlike many doomsday writings though, he also offers ideas on what must be done to counter the threat of overconnectivity, but warns that corrective measures must be employed sooner rather than later. I found the facts carefully researched in this book to be a verification of what was to me (and I’m sure to many others) intuitive regarding the totally uncontrolled nature of the Internet, including the degradation of societal morality fueled by the anonymity the Internet provides. The reader will find many interesting points made regarding these issues through anecdotal revelations of our recent and distant past. Highly recommended reading.
I found this book very interesting, thought provoking as well as pretty well documented. As A bit of a Luddite about new technology I could be biased.I suppose that is true of a sizable amount of those in my age group. My bias is not one of navigating a web site, learning a new OS, downloading or anything of that nature. I am however cautious and genuinely concerned of the loss of face to face communication where Simile, metaphor, innuendo and body language are essentially absent. I am not pleased with the advent of reporting one's whereabouts, activities and company publicly, nor with the ability to type with ones thumbs. The underlying and also poignant text of this book are worth reading I would recommend it to all age groups. As always the message and importance of it may be lost to those with closed minds.
This book is an excellent survey of historical examples of connectivity gone-wild. It was enlightening to read that our current challenges with the internet are not new. Instead, nothing is new under the sun, it's just the methods that change. The book did such a good job of correlating todays internet to the past, that the author really should have just left it there. Unfortunately, the author dives into his own ideas of what will help prevent the internet poison of overconnectivity. Somewhere along the way the author chimes in on global warming advocating European-style taxation of Co2 emissions. He also encourages government regulation, more regulations and taxation to help prevent another currency melt-down. To solve the problem of spam and internet viruses, he considers the impact of charging a fee per email.
While I appreciate his ideas to help save the world, they are a weak conclusion in his very rather unbiased take on historical overconnectivity. Instead of providing personal perspectives about global warming and the need for further government control, he should stick with trying to convince innovators to account for positive feedback in systems they design.
Maybe his next book will be about how government, the IMF and the federal reserve are the worst positive feedback loops that exist. He could also account for the ways government positive feedback loops crush liberty, especially when checks-and-balances are ignored. Trusting in government to solve positive feedback loops is like letting the pigs run the farm (read Animal Farm by George Orwell). But, who needs the farm when we have the internet.
First, Davidow's "Marketing High Technology" is a personal top 5 business selection. It provides a powerful insiders view of technical marketing with exceptional working first hand examples and bold (but well documented) theories. So perhaps my expectations of "Overconnected" were too lofty. That said, even objectively this work falls far short of properly examining such a bold premise. A better title for this book would be "Superconnected" and the subtitle should be reexamined as well.
Unfortunately this book cannot determine if it wants to be overtly scholarly or pleasantly anecdotal. Even within paragraphs the book seems to switch back and forth. The book is not well organized and details too well the distant past at the expense the recent past like the subprime meltdown.
I certainly see intrigue in Davidow's premise and some items are well covered. The book does in fact lend some insight to compounding of errors by internet tools. However I am disappointed that Davidow as a technologist did not see that many specific issues could be addressed by technologists with the correct corporate and governmental oversight. The stronger point that Davidow makes is actually the compounded emotional frenzy that a high level of connection can cause. Although he addresses and defines it there is really no insightful discussion about social causes and issues can be both inflated and solved.
When Davidow wrote Marketing HT he was recently a leader in that field. Currently he is a venture capitalist. Sadly a book on that subject would have been much more insightful... Save your money on this one.
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