Book Search: "The Glass Cage: Automation and Us"

     When I began my book search, I was surprised to find that there were so many books written about the information age. I started my search broad, using terms like “information age” and “network society,” and eventually zeroed in on a more specific subject. I couldn’t seem to think of specific search terms from the start, so I relied on Amazon’s “suggested for you” books to gain more insight on potential search terms. As I dug deeper, I found that I was really interested in the effects of technology on society. 

     The first book that caught my attention was “The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education From Itself,” by Glenn H. Reynolds. It is a 112-page book and was rated 4.5 stars on Amazon. It is about the costliness of public and private schooling, and the rise of online education. There were 45 customer reviews, which said things like “this book was very easy to understand and very thoroughly researched.” Other reviews said it was a bit slow to read. It was found in 448 libraries in my area and had 13 reviews on Google Books. Library Thing had few reviews on this book. When I went to ProQuest and Project Muse, I could not seem to find any reviews. This lack of feedback urged me to keep looking.

     The next book I came across was “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,” published August 19, 2014 by Daniel J. Levitin. This 512-page book got 4 stars on Amazon and had 30 reviews, 27 of which were positive. It was found in 956 libraries in my area and received mixed reviews on Google Books. Some readers loved the book, while others said it was too critical. This inconsistency turned me away and I continued searching.

     After a while, I became frustrated because I could not find any books that interested me that were also published within the last two years. I conducted a separate Google search to find the bestsellers of books in the technology field. While reading through the list, one title and book cover caught my eye. It is called “The Glass Cage: Automation and Us” by Nicholas Carr. The title perfectly describes how I view our high-tech world today. This book received 4.5 stars on Amazon and had 5 positive reviews. There was one negative review that claimed Carr focuses almost entirely on the humanistic aspects of automation and gives only very limited attention to its effects on jobs. This was the only negativity I found on the book but it did not get me down. I am still very interested in reading it. In a review on ProQuest, Carl Flays (from “The Booklist”) compares this book to Carr’s first book, “The Shallows” published in 2010. He raves how “Carr brilliantly and scrupulously explores all the psychological and economic angles of our increasingly problematic reliance on machinery and microchips to manage almost every aspect of our lives.” I was finally sold on this book, and began looking up other types of reviews that were out there. I actually came across an interview where the author, Nicholas Carr, talks about the release of his new book. I posted the link to the interview below if anyone is interested!

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Spark/ID/2541123663/

ProQuest citation:

Hays, Carl. "The Glass Cage: Automation and Us." The Booklist 110.22 (2014): 21. ProQuest. Web. 9 Oct. 2014.

Julia Zureikat