James Gleick (www.around.com) was born in New York City in 1954. He worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times, founded an early Internet portal, the Pipeline, and wrote three previous books: Chaos, Genius, and Faster. His latest book Isaac Newton is available from Pantheon. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with his wife.
What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier
by James Gleick
Paperback
(Reprint)
- ISBN-13: 9780375713910
- Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date: 06/10/2003
- Edition description: Reprint
- Pages: 320
- Product dimensions: 5.14(w) x 8.06(h) x 0.67(d)
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For the past decade change seemed to happen over night, every night. Fueled by the exponential rise of technology, the digital revolution was difficult for many to make sense of, but James Gleick watched and analyzed, criticized and commended, participated in and prophesized about the instantaneous transformations of the world as we knew it.
What Just Happened is a collection of Gleick’s articles from this equally exciting and terrifying decade—remember Y2K?—that range from condemnations of maddeningly pervasive bugs in Microsoft software to the invisible shackles we wear in an “Inescapably Connected” world. Combining insight and reason with wit and passion, What Just Happened is an essential tour of our technology-driven mania.
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“Gleick’s a crack investigator who digs for the exceptional facts…. A worthy overview…on the brave new problems we’ve faced—and will face into the future.” –Detroit Free Press
“Invokes nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent time, before we took all this technology for granted.” –The Rocky Mountain News
“What Just Happened is a lively time capsule that examines the recent past—one that, not long ago, seemed fairly far-fetched.” –Columbus Dispatch
“Gleick is a writer blessed with a techie’s mind and insight. . . . As we further immerse ourselves into a plugged-in world, it would be wise to listen to what Glieck had to say back when.” —Book Street USA
"Gleick is the king of popular science writing." —Irish Times
"Gleick is one of America's leading exegete of the technological revolution that, like it or not, is taking over all our lives. He spends his at the cutting edge of computer and allied sciences, returning from the front with visions of the future." —The Observer
“Gleick’s essays remain pertinent.” —The New York Times Book Review
“James Gleick . . . is on the outer reaches of the electronic frontier . . . and [he] has mastered it.” —The Roanoke Times
“What Just Happened is a lively time capsule that examines the recent past— one that, not long ago, seemed mostly far-fetched.” —The Columbus Dispatch
It's hard to imagine anyone better qualified to chronicle the computing and Internet revolution than James Gleick, who first came to wide public attention as the author of Chaos.
That's not just a cheap pun: Chaos theory sought to understand the "jagged edges and sudden leaps" that appear throughout nature, transforming systems from orderly linear growth to apparent madness. Kind of like what happened with PCs and the Web. Gleick actually founded and ran one of the earliest Internet service providers, before returning to journalism and writing the bulk of the essays collected here in What Just Happened. What better qualifications could you ask for?
Gleick ranged far and wide during the '90s and '00s: AT&T Bell Labs in 1993, where he thought he'd find the coming network revolution (that's where it had always happened before); Microsoft's Redmond campus in 1992 for a preview of Word 2.0 (which proved just as buggy as the 1.0 version he'd become obsessed with); Silicon Valley; and all over the Internet (chronicling the arrival of such phenomena as forwarded email jokes and eBay auctions). Some of it almost seems like fantasy now, if not for the fact that we've just lived through it. (Remember when a reporter scarfed up the mcdonalds.com domain, and what McDonald's had to do to gain custody?)
As with any revolution, even the smartest "micro-level" expectations often prove wrong. (Apple's Newton is best remembered as the butt of "Doonesbury" jokes; cable companies never became telephone providers en masse, and interactive CD-ROM developers never repaid their venture capitalists.) But Gleick has shown an uncanny ability to put his finger on the megastuff that really matters: from the impact of cellphones on human relationships to the collisions between fair-use rights and copyright owners, privacy advocates and the government, Microsoft and the world. On the whole, these essays hold up remarkably well, and even where they don't, they're a remarkable snapshot of times that won't soon return. (Bill Camarda)