Release 2.0

Rating:
Summary: You'll pay to hear what you already know!
Review: An old Subgenius adage goes "You'll pay to hear what you already know!" So Dyson apparently decided she could write the /best/ book ever by writing things /everyone/ knows. "Email will change business communication'? Oh my God, Esther, thanks for the news flash! What's next for Release 4.0? A timely pensée on how one day we will all own VCRs (that stands for "video-cassette recorder"!), and how this will change everything, /everything/?

How about this wild futuristic scenario: in the future, you (YOU!) will be able to make a book by just buying a microcassette recorder and some blank tape, taking it home and taping your unorganized frappucino-addled ramblings. You'll mail the tapes to a typing service, and have them send the MSWord documents /right/ to the printers. What about editors? In the future, everything is fast, no time for editing! Have the publisher bankroll the printing of a few hundred thousand, and wham! "Just-in-time" publishing! The question is, just in time for what?

Rating:
Summary: A useful community-discussion but lacks punch
Review: Because I'm in the industry of know OF Esther Dyson, and have ocassionally read her stuff in the computer press. To be honest I bought this book expecting more, and found it disappointing. What I found was a columnist making her living. We learnt about her network building, her "names" and could see how she developed those into an income stream of words covering the last 10 years of the Internet.

On the other hand I thought her discussion of "communities" was thoughtful. It made me stop and think about relationships and contributing.

In my opinion there's little in this book for thoughtful people who are already in the IT industry. But perhaps for people who are looking for a "humanist" view of the Internet and don't know where to start, this book would be quite useful. I was thinking here of an Adult Education class or night class. The jargon might be a bit tough in places, but with a guide this book might suit that audience.

Rating:
Summary: how can something so exciting be presented so boringly?
Review: I haven't finished this book and perhaps will not. Early chapters provide information about the events and personalities that led to the popularization of the internet. The basis for Al Gore's claim to have 'invented' the Web is explained. But by and large Ms. Dyson has an uncanny flair for whinging on and on about the obvious in a distinctly unpoetic and uninteresting way. The book is so obviously narrated into a hand-held recorder, and then transcribed and cleaned up by a third party that I found myself wishing I could read the original transcripts, if only for laughs. If you are a reader who knows absolutely nothing about the World Wide Web and have never even sat down with a browser and surfed, then this book may be of some interest to you. Otherwise you will sitting there being told (rather breathlessly) the equivalent of "Fire engines are red and have loud sirens" and "Oranges are grown in Florida and California and they do not like frost".

Rating:
Summary: We either know this or we still don't
Review: I tried hard to appreciate Esther Dyson's book Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, but failed. Briefly stated, the problem for me is that the topics she deals with, while important, are presented in a rather bloodless, chatty techno-speak, that either states the obvious or leaves the reader wondering what she is talking about. I kept going, hoping to discover what the buzz was about this book but only succeeded in achieving that brain dead state one can reach after hours of reading business memos and reports. I didn't find it informative, provocative, helpful, or clear. Certainly not fun. There are better, less self-centered, books about the implications of living in a digital age. Dysons 'Design' reads like it was formulated by committee. I wouldn't want to base my life on it.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointed at her book considering how famous she is
Review: In an attempt to explain how important our new e-world is Dyson comes off sounding like some form of low level illuminati in this work. And, no, I didn't like this book at all.

Dyson's choice of subject matter is a difficult one. Usually by the time a book in this genre gets published it's contents are outdated or stale. Most authors use try to counteract this is by rehashing all the known universal truths on a subject in the hope of shedding some new light for the reader. No matter how hard I worked I just couldn't seem to find that here. Dyson's contents are just more of the same.

I take full responsibility for not liking this book on myself. I want to live in this new world by engaging it, to the best of my abilities, head on. And, I feel this type of nouveau linguistics does those of us who are trying to live here a disservice.

Rating:
Summary: Dyson chats about the internet.
Review: In this book Dyson presents us with her view of how society will be changed by the power of computers, the internet and the ubiquitous information they offer. Distance is of no consequence to on-line communities, neither are time differences. On the net, everyone's just a mouse-click away and so to some extent hierarchies are flattened and decision making tends to be more distributed and communal.

I found some of the book a little self-satisfied - Dyson drops the names of a lot of important people she knows without always making the relevance of this obvious. Also some of her enthusiasm for free-markets and how they are transforming the Russian economy seems a little overstated considering Russian economics is now even more corrupt and dysfunctional than it was under communism.

These criticisms aside, Dyson is at her best when discussing issues of privacy, intellectual property, anonymity, encryption, communication and advertising and how these will be changed and challenged by wide-spread internet access. Her discussion in these chapters makes reading the book worthwhile and introduces many fascinating ideas which may become standard features of internet communication in the near future.