Download The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data AudioBook Free
We used to state "seeing is thinking"; now googling is thinking. With 24/7 access to nearly all the world's information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the catalogue or the encyclopedia shelf searching for answers. We just open our browsers, type in a few keywords, and await the information to come quickly to us. Indeed, the web has revolutionized just how we learn and know as well as how we interact with each other. Yet this explosion of technological innovation in addition has produced a curious paradox: Even as we know more, we seem to comprehend less. While a wealth of literature has been specialized in life with the web, the deep philosophical implications of the seismic shift never have been properly explored as yet. Demonstrating that knowledge based on reason plays an essential role in society and that there is a lot more to "knowing" than simply acquiring information, leading philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch shows how our digital life-style makes us overvalue some means of processing information over others and so hazards distorting what it means to be human. With far-reaching implications, Lynch's discussion charts a route from Plato's cave to Shannon's numerical theory of information to Google Cup, illustrating that technology itself isn't the situation, neither is it the solution. Instead it will be how we adapt our intellects to these new tools that will ultimately decide whether or not the "Internet of Things" - all those gadgets on our wrists, inside our wallets, and on our laps - will be a world wide web gain for humanity. On the way, Lynch uses a philosopher's lens to examine some of the most urgent issues facing digital life today, including how communal press is revolutionizing just how we think about personal privacy; why a greater reliance on Wikipedia and Google doesn't invariably make knowledge more democratic; and the perils of using big data exclusively to predict social trends. Promising to modernize our knowledge of what it means to be human in the digital years, The Internet of Us creates on previous works by Nicholas Carr, James Gleick, and Jaron Lanier to give us a required guide on how to understand the philosophical quagmire this is the Information Age.
