The Best of Technology Writing 2007

by Steven Levy (Editor)

The year’s best writing on a collection as imaginative and compelling as its dynamic subject “This book is not just an illuminating and instructive guide to our high-tech frontier. It’s also a great testimony to the power of that most ancient of technologies, the written word.” —Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You Together the essays in The Best of Technology Writing 2007 capture the versatility and verve of technology writing today. Solicited through an open online nominating process, these pieces explore a wide range of intriguing topics—from “crowdsourcing” to the online habits of urban moms to the digital future of movie production. The Best of Technology Writing 2007 will appeal to anyone who enjoys stellar writing. Steven Levy is a Senior Editor at Newsweek, where he writes the biweekly column “The Technologist.” One of the most acclaimed and versatile technology writers in the country, Levy has written six books, including The Perfect Thing (about Apple’s iPod) and Hackers, which PC Magazine ’s readers voted the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years. He has written for many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Wired . Featuring contributions from Kevin Berger Paul Boutin Kiera Butler Joshua Davis Julian Dibbell Matt Gaffney Lori Gottlieb John Gruber Jeff Howe Kevin Kelly Jaron Lanier Preston Lerner Farhad Manjoo Justin McElroy Ben McGrath Katharine Mieszkowski Emily Nussbaum Jeffrey M. O’Brien Larry O’Brien The Onion Adam L. Penenberg John Seabrook Philip Smith Aaron Swartz Clive Thompson Jeffrey R. Young digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology

Paperback

First published September 1, 2007

About the author

Steven Levy is editor at large at Wired, and author of eight books, including the new Facebook: the Inside Story, the definitive history of that controversial company. His previous works include the legendary computer history Hackers, Artificial Life, the Unicorn 's Secret, In the Plex (the story of Google, chose as Amazon and Audible's best business book of 2011), and Crypto, which won the Frankfurt E-book Award for the best non-fiction book of 2001. He was previously the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Shinynickel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like most collections of articles or essays, there are some pieces that leave me stunned, educated, or inspired, and others that leave me cold.

The introduction suffers from a severe case of blog-envy, and unnecessarily spends a big chunk of its wordcount trying to piss on blogging, nothing that without the backing of large organizations individual bloggers do not have the time or funding to produce heavily researched or investigative pieces. Which, you know, I agree with. Why it was necessary to spend so much time emphasizing that in the middle of introducing the articles comes off like a jealousy-driven non sequitur. It's also strange, given that three of the articles included in the collection *are* from online.

Some of the highlights:

Kevin Kelly's "Scan This Book!" is about efforts to scan books and put them in search engines and on the internet, particularly the 75% of the world's books that are 'orphaned' - whose publishers either don't find it profitable to print them any longer, or don't even know whether they still hold copyright on them - and languish unread yet still untouchable. This essay MADE this collection for me - it's well-written, inspiring, and makes clear in a way that I had never experienced before the absolutely heartbreaking waste we are creating in not scanning these books. Even if you don't read this whole collection, get it from your library just for this essay.

Kevin Berger's "The Artist as Mad Scientist" focuses on the artist Natalie Jeremijenko, who fuses technology and art to connect the observer to the environment - the first of her projects that Berger details involves putting buoys into the Hudson River that will light up when fish are near them, letting observers know when to feed them. And the food provided? Is treated with chelating agents to help clean the PCBs in their blood from decades of General Electric dumping waste into the river. Her work is absolutely fascinating. Less fascinating is Berger's ham-handed attempts to force the 'Mad Scientist' metaphor, and the sudden left turn the article takes into Jeremijenko's family life. She works! Her husband works! However do they manage? What about the children? Let's spend a lot of time talking about it! I'm getting sick of articles about women doing cool stuff that feel they have to focus on how this affects their family lives - not nearly the same amount of concern is showed about how men could possibly balance career and family.

Jeff Howe's "The Rise of Crowdsourcing" examines how certain aspects of the internet revolution have 'crowdsourced' work away from professionals to the public - for example, photosharing sites such as iStockphoto and flickr have have made the work of most professional stock photographers obsolete or drastically altered. Some aspects of the change are liberating, and some are terrifying - such as when an executive brags that work he was paying professional programmers $2,000 for was completed by people he found on Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk for $5.

Emily Nussaum's "Mothers Anonymous" is looks at an utterly anonymous parenting site whose users are situated largely in New York. The internet has been moving increasingly toward identification, the use of real names, or at least consistent screen names, in discourse. On UrbanBaby, however, not only is everyone anonymous, but it's often hard or impossible to tell even if two different comments are by the same person. This turns the discussion alternately vicious and raw, wide-open and truthful while full of suspicion about lies, all carried out in the context of childraising for both the incredibly rich and the far less rich.

Lori Gottlieb's "How Do I Love Thee?" takes on the increasing reliance of online dating sites like eHarmony, Chemistry.com, and Duet on academic research to increase the likelihood of successful pairings between users. It's a fascinating inside look on how the more match-focused sites (unlike say, match.com, which lets its users find each other and offers very little in the way of suggestions) attempt to connect their users, and what variables they feel are most important.

There are actually another 5-7 articles that just rocked my socks off in this collection - overall the thing's great - but I'm going to stop here.

Some lowlights:

Jaron Lanier's "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". I would suggest an alternate title - "When Wikipedia Takes Over the World You'll All Be Sorry!" Wow. This is an entire article comparing Wikipedia and other collective online systems to a) markets and b) political systems, then pointing out how badly they would do at it. There's a lot of noise about how the world really needs some kind of elite gatekeepers or more intelligent folks to keep the whole thing from going to hell. Which, you know, as soon as I see Wikipedia on the Democratic or Republican ticket for the presidency I'll start to worry. In the meantime this just reads like a weird over-reaction to some of the cool collective efforts going on. The words "Maoist" and "hive mind" are used an awful lot.

Philip Smith's "The Worst Date Ever for an Apple Tech" is... wow. I wondered whether it was included in the collection as some kind of stalking horse for the editor's assertion that online blogging would never be as good as real articles. Summary: One time? This guy? He went on a date with someone form online? AND OMG SHE WAS NOT THE WOMAN IN THE PICTURE! She was fat! And she had kids! And was just so crazy! She wanted him to pay for things and have a threesome! And then he was just so manly that she followed him to his house and he had to get a restraining order! Isn't it kind of hysterical, and don't you feel bad for him, this poor well-intentioned guy? What a crazy woman! So demanding and fat! Dude. You had a bad online date. Deal.

Didn't the "OMG online dating people are sometimes not what they say!!!1!" realization happen least five years ago? This is an annual collection of articles, and I have a lot of trouble seeing why this was even topical, asinine weirdness inside of it aside.

So, summary? A lot of really fantastic articles, a few that I disagreed with but were still interesting assertions even though they pissed me off (see: Mao/hivemind), and very few duds (see: Apple Tech Date). Definitely worth a read if you're interested in the doors technology is opening for people today, and where it may head in the immediate future.

[Sarah Rigg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some pieces were very, very good, like "This is a Bike. Trust Us." about recumbent bikes and other fast but nonstandard bicycles. I also liked the feature piece on driverless cars. Overall, I'd recommend it, but there were several pieces I could have skipped.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title can be deceiving; this book is "technology" writing not "technological" writing. I think these days, with the pervasiveness of the internet and computers throughout the world, the definition of "technology" needs to be reined in a bit from how it is used here. The first essay is about someone with multiple PhDs who makes scientifically-based art installations. I've never been one for that kind of art, so maybe my opinion is jaded, but there is nothing remotely technological about this biographical piece. Later, there is an essay about the various posts found on a forum for moms in New York. Websites and forum software are technology, I'll agree, but going on at length about the content instead of the medium makes this essay also seem out of place. Additionally, I think there are a couple of pieces that aren't essays at all but rather transcribed speeches. This may be "writing" in some sense but to me they have a different feel than a straight-up essay.

Up to this point I've been quite negative. I don't want to say that this book is not worth it though. As I said elsewhere, I'm always impressed by clear writing, especially when it's about technological topics. I'll be happy to lend this book out if you want to read it but maybe don't splurge on buying it yourself.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this through dailylit.com.

I thought the collection was hit-or-miss. The essays profiling artists and CEOs of tech companies were pretty interesting, but I could have done without the really weird piece by an unsuccessful online dater (Philip Smith,
"The Worst Date Ever for an Apple Tech"), or the self-absorbed "A Non-Programmer's Apology," which seemed like a few pages of the author telling us how talented he is at writing while failing to demonstrate it.

I loved the humor of "Dragon Slayers or Tax Evaders," an investigation of the potential tax ramifications of the enormous virtual economies running on MMORPGs like EverQuest and World of Warcraft.

Overall, this collection is worth flipping through, but somehow already dated--a lot of the essays and articles made references to the breakthrough technologies and faddish websites of 2004 and 2005.

[Shana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do love essays, and I have a weakness for the thematic collections that come out every year because it's so hard to keep up with good essay writing when you don't want just a few magazines' sensibilities. Some collections, though, get less imaginative in scope with each year's group, and that can be a real disappointment. (Last year's collection of food writing essays was awful: It was only about, well, food!)

This technology collection doesn't disappoint, focusing on technology and its impact on society and the way we work, live, and enjoy -- and the ways we dream of achieving.

[Christine]

I got a review copy of this at the used bookstore. It's a collection of essays from magazines and websites. I figured since my job entails technology writing, I might as well try to embrace my inner techie writer a little. I can't figure out if the technology covered in the book is more interesting than what we cover at work, or if these writers make it more interesting. Maybe I'll figure that out and get some inspiration by the time I get through them all.

[Dest · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't like all of the essays in this book (the one about the bad internet date was particularly ridiculous) but there was one essay (about the UrbanBaby message board revealing the desperation of motherhood) that really stuck with me.

The thing is, I thought the pieces in this book would be more tech-driven, but they were actually more about human relationships mediated by the internet.