Over the Weekend

After searching Amazon books with terms like “Information Society,” “Digital Divide,” and “social media” I came up with three books I would be interested in reading. The first one was “The Second Machine Age” by Erik Brynjolfsson. This book is a New York Times Best Seller and has copious amounts of quality reviews on Amazon Books. It can be purchased as either a MP3 CD or as a paper/hardcover book. “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal” by Nick Bilton is the next book on my list. I found this book through my “social media” search and it interested me because I am an avid Twitter user. It has an average review of 4.5 stars/5 and has been reviewed almost 1000 times on Amazon Books. Its 304 pages as a hard/papercover book but can also be purchased as an Mp3 CD. My next book which I will be reading is “The Information Diet: The Case for Conscious Consumption” by Clay A. Johnson. This book has a solid 4 stars on Amazon Books and has been rated almost 100 times. It was published in January of 2012 and will cost about $17, although im sure I could find it cheaper somewhere else on the internet. Amazon books gives quick summaries of these books and the beginning of their summary for this book really caught my eye. “The modern human animal spends upwards of 11 hours out of every 24 in a state of constant consumption. Not eating, but gorging on information ceaselessly spewed from the screens and speakers we hold dear” I think it will be very interesting to learn about how the public consumption of information has changed in the recent years which I have been living in. Also I am interested in researchers thoughts on how our levels of consumption affect the other aspects of our lives. This book is found on 692 libraries on WorldCat and some of its Subject classifications are: Personal Information Management and Information Resources Management. On Google Books it has a 3 star rating and on LibraryThing it has a popularity level of 51,069 and has a little over a 3 star rating being rated over 60 times. Although this book did not receive 5 star reviews across the board and many reviewers mentioned some drawbacks from the book, I am still choosing this book because it seems to have a great overall message and almost every reviewer regardless of rating still said it is worth a read.