I have been reading this 250 page book called "The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives" for a while now. In between took up two other books and wrapped them up! Finally finished it today guess mainly because I have this OCD tendency to complete reading all the books I pick up. Now that I am done, I am trying to recall what new ideas I picked up and nothing much comes to mind! This is sad.
Book is written by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen and came out two years back. They both have interesting backgrounds. Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and is currently the Executive Chairman of Google. Cohen is the Director of Google Ideas and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, etc. With this background, I thought they will deliver extremely insightful views on how the the digital revolution is/will change the world. They have put together some six chapters all of which are titled as "The Future of xyz", with xyz replaced by States, Revolution, Terrorism, Conflicts, Reconstruction, etc. These are all interesting areas to explore from the Digital Age perspective. But there is no new vision or insight anywhere to be found. If you have been watching the news, reading magazines over the last decade, you'd know pretty much all the superficial things they have stated. Occasionally some parts where they are talking about isolating parts of the cyberspace that are contaminated into quarantine (similar to what we do in real-world to isolate terrorism sponsoring national entities or spread of a disease), issuing digital visas to visit parts of the net in future, etc. might be new/interesting to some readers or policy makers. But I had a hard time finding many such examples. They also have played it very safe so that they are not angering US Govt (they are against WikiLeaks, etc.) that might jeopardize their own future careers. Might be a good idea from their personal career point of view but it makes the book read more like a US Govt report rather than an insightful analysis of outsiders.
I guess enough said. I will keep it short this time. :-)
-sundar.
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