Showing results for "Technology Matters" in History & Culture

The celebrated author of The Making of Second Life and Game Design Secrets Wagner, James Au, delivers an engrossing exploration of how nascent metaverse platforms have already captured the imagination of millions. Featuring powerful stories and dozens of incisive interviews with insiders including Metaverse creator Neal Stephenson himself, the author uses his unique, grassroots-level perspective as the first reporter embedded in a metaverse platform.

Art and science are famous opposites. Contemporary innovation mostly keeps them far apart. But in this book, David Edwards, world-renowned inventor; Harvard professor of the practice of idea translation; creator of breathable insulin, edible food packaging, and digital scents, reveals that the secret to creating very new things of lasting benefit, including innovations we will need to sustain human life on the planet, lies in perceiving art and science as one.

In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions - clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips - and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer.

Activists, pundits, politicians, and the press frequently proclaim today's digitally mediated racial justice activism the new civil rights movement. As Charlton D. McIlwain shows in this book, the story of racial justice movement organizing online is much longer and varied than most people know. Beginning with the simultaneous rise of civil rights and computer revolutions in the 1960s, McIlwain, for the first time, chronicles the long relationship between African Americans, computing technology, and the Internet.

“Innovation” is the hottest buzzword in business. But what if our obsession with finding the next big thing has distracted us from the work that matters most? “The most important book I’ve read in a long time . . . It explains so much about what is wrong with our technology, our...