I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work & Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
Nick Bilton
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0307591123
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Are we driving off a digital cliff and heading for disaster, unable to focus, maintain concentration, or form the human bonds that make life worth living? Are media and business doomed and about to be replaced by amateur hour?
The world, as Nick Bilton—with tongue-in-cheek—shows, has been going to hell for a long, long time, and what we are experiencing is the twenty-first-century version of the fear that always takes hold as new technology replaces the old. In fact, as Bilton shows, the digital era we are part of is, in all its creative and disruptive forms, the foundation for exciting and engaging experiences not only for business but society as well.
Both visionary and practical, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works captures the zeitgeist of an emerging age, providing the understanding of how a radically changed media world is influencing human behavior:
• With a walk on the wild side—through the porn industry—we see how this business model is leading the way, adapting product to consumer needs and preferences and beating piracy.
• By understanding how the Internet is creating a new type of consumer, the “consumnivore,” living in a world where immediacy trumps quality and quantity, we see who is dictating the type of content being created.
• Through exploring the way our brains are adapting, we gain a new understanding of the positive effect of new media narratives on thinking and action. One fascinating study, for example, shows that surgeons who play video games are more skillful than their nonplaying counterparts.
• Why social networks, the openness of the Internet, and handy new gadgets are not just vehicles for telling the world what you had for breakfast but are becoming the foundation for “anchoring communities” that tame information overload and help determine what news and information to trust and consume and what to ignore.
• Why the map of tomorrow is centered on “Me,” and why that simple fact means a totally new approach to the way media companies shape content.
• Why people pay for experiences, not content; and why great storytelling and extended relationships will prevail and enable businesses to engage with customers in new ways that go beyond merely selling information, instead creating unique and meaningful experiences.
I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works walks its own talk by creating a unique reader experience: Semacodes embedded in both print and eBook versions will take readers directly to Bilton’s website (www.NickBilton.com), where they can access videos of the author further developing his point of view and also delve into the research that was key to shaping the central ideas of the book. The website will also offer links to related content and the ability to comment on a chapter, allowing the reader to join the conversation.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Illustrated Edition) (1st Edition)
Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High (2nd Edition)
Trading Options: Using Technical Analysis to Design Winning Trades
The Zurich Axioms: The Rules of Risk and Reward Used by Generations of Swiss Bankers
Entrepreneurial DNA: The Breakthrough Discovery that Aligns Your Business to Your Unique Strengths
can be traced back more than a thousand years, the genre really started to take form and become a mass medium between the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. Comic books grew dramatically at that time because their creators decided to focus on children, not just adults, and found an audience that could appreciate silly humor and illustrations. As a result, hundreds of new comic-book titles were born in the late 1930s, including the modern superheroes Batman and Superman. Another genre,
rises. If the “outstanding service” turns out to be wretched, my trust falls. In addition, he reminds me, once someone breaks our trust, it can take a very long time to gain it back—if ever. Take the website Yelp.com, which allows anyone to write a review of a restaurant or business. The site opened for business in 2004 and grew steadily, winning fans who could find great barbecue on a road trip or the best place to fix a vacuum cleaner. But there were questions from the beginning: How could
design integration editor, charged with rethinking how the print narrative can morph and adapt to a digital form. More recently, I’ve joined the business section writing staff as the lead blogger for Bits, the paper’s technology blog. When I looked at all the different jobs I’ve been involved with over the last fifteen years—from advertising, writing, and photography to video, programming, and user interface design—I noticed one undeviating thread that ties it all together: storytelling. All
computer engineering degree and a lot of patience. So we started to steal all of our music, all the time, years before social peer-to-peer sites such as Napster and TekNap arrived on the music pirating scene. Instead we would go to hacker sites called trackers and search for and share the MP3 files and albums we wanted. These peer applications and trackers, unlike legitimate digital music stores, were incredibly simple to use. In 1998 I remember buying one of the first consumer digital music
stimulation. “They didn’t grow up thinking print reading was the end all, be all of the highest level of scholarly pursuit,” he said. Carrier’s points about reading are at the heart of the debate over multitasking. Kids come home from school and open their laptops (purportedly to do homework) but may also watch movies, chat with friends, or update their status on a social network. Then, when they sit down with a book, their brains say, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m not used to just sitting here with
