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  The Evolution of Publishing in the Information Age

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Push, Data Smog and Breaking Up America

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Posted by JP on May 13, 1997 at 06:59:25:
In Reply to: Push technology: Friend or Foe posted by Drasnia on May 09, 1997 at 05:42:44:

I've never quite understood how push technology is different from fancy email. We've been subscribing to specialized email lists for decades but nobody thought it was such a big thing until Pointcast and BackWeb dressed it up some with HTML and web multimedia -- and encased it in a non-standard reader.

More on your point about what to do with all that information, there's an interesting new book I used in my NYU class about information glut. Data Smog by David Shenk (HarperEdge, ISBN 0-06-018701-8) is a reasonable, informed critique of the media technology revolution. I assigned Bill Gates' The Road Ahead as the text for the course, and the Shenk book is a good counterpoint to Gates' techno-utopianism.

Another new book that looks promising -- this one about the downside of "one-to-one marketing" -- is Breaking Up America: Advertising and the New Media World by Joseph Turow (University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-81749-0). I've only seen a sample chapter, but Turow makes some good points about branding and versioning.

(And who needs a spell checker, anyway?)



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