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An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
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| List Price: | £15.99 |
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Product Description
Explains how expanding markets and new Internet technology allow individuals in all fields, political and cultural, to effectively combat big media and government.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #855809 in Books
- Published on: 2007-04-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Glenn Reynolds, law professor at the University of Tennessee, is known throughout the Internet as one of the premier bloggers on his site Instapundit.com. A contributing editor to TechCentralStation, Reynolds also blogs for MSNBC at GlennReynolds.com and has had his writings featured in the New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, and Wall Street Journal. Reynolds is the coauthor of Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy and The Appearance of Impropriety: How the Ethics Wars Have Undermined American Government, Business, and Society.
Customer Reviews
Little Brother Strikes Back
We are just now having the greatest technological revolution since James Watt. Watt's revolution meant that businesses, governments and so on gradually became bigger and bigger, because that was the most practical and the most profitable. Big Brother bullied Little Brother and Goliath kicked David around.
Now the IT technology is so cheap that individual artists can be their own labels and bureaucracy has become so cheap that even very small businesses can become multinationals. Small business and small anything else can now do what only large organizations could do ten years ago and at the same time the large organizations remain afflicted by the hidden costs of bigness. The bottlenecks are no longer capital and technology but initiative and good ideas. All this means that Little Brother rides again.
Reynolds is not the first to describe all this and most of what he writes I have seen elsewhere, but his book covers more territory than any other I have encountered and is therefore a good book for beginners.
My chief objections are that somewhere along the author goes off topic for no apparent reason and begins advocating the colonization of Mars (Reynolds is obviously one of those science fiction enthusiasts who want their old space operas turned into science fact). And also he ends the book with various ruminations, that would do quite well in a blog, but which in a book should be better structured and better thought out. Too much is left dangling in the wind.
Because of these weeknesses I can only give the book four stars.
A book which promises much but veers too far away from its core topic.
Verdict: A book which promises much but veers too far away from its core topic.
Smilies: 2 out of 5 smilies
This title & the tagline of this book attracted me. An army of Davids, a superb description of the internet population as a whole. The author Glenn Reynolds is a fairly prominent blogger whose site is instapundit.com.
Overall
A strong writer with some really good insights into technology & society. The ideas are very well laid out & do make you stop & think. On this level this book is a success. The fact that the author has been around the block, has a successful blog - gives credence to his words. Just avoid the last few chapters. Not recommend - as there are many similar but better books out there.
