Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (1997)

This is a technically informed, empirically minded, and engaging account of an epoch-making invention (arguably one of the two or three most important inventions of the 20th century, other candidates being nuclear technology and antibiotics). Riordan and Hoddeson spend the bulk of their book on the technical aspects of work on the transistor, and they do this well, though after a point I had trouble following (for example, the apparently important difference between point contact and junction transistors). Along the way, they also pen deft portraits of the key figures and key organizations, above all, the incomparable mid-century Bell Labs. In terms of the technical aspects, both theoretical work (much of it coming from Europe) in quantum mechanics, in particular the behavior of electrons, and practical work, in obtaining purified forms of germanium and silicon and manipulating the flow of electrons, were crucial. Serendipity played a more frequent role than I would have imagined. Some of my take-aways and reflections include the following: 1) until reading this book, I hadn't fully understood that the key function of vacuum tubes and of transistors was to boost signals (even after reading the book, I didn't quite grasp how either of them did this). 2) nor did I understand that both of these technologies were developed with the transmission of telephone calls in mind (the primary business of ATT, Bell Labs' sponsor, after all). Their use in computers was, initially, a byproduct. For this reason, the full magnitude of the transistor revolution only dawned on people, including its inventors, a couple of decades after its invention in 1947. 3) the book did an excellent job illustrating the role of both collaboration and competition in scientific progress. 4) I was reminded of Robert Gordon's important book The Rise and Decline of American Growth. Gordon emphasizes the years 1920 to 1950 as a period of unprecedented and since unmatched growth in productivity. I don't think he explains exactly why that was the case (though come to think of it, he may attribute the surge in productivity to a more fully worked out application of electric power). I'm pretty sure he doesn't discuss the development of the transistor. Of course, while the transistor was invented at the tail end of this period, it only came into widespread use in the 1950s and 1960s. Its proliferation has coincided not with the increase, or even just maintenance, of productivity growth, but with its slowing down. Of course, it has changed entertainment, culture, news, politics, and much more quite dramatically. So a bit of a conundrum there. 5) this is not an original point, but this book, in conjunction with Gordon's, has led me to think of the transistor as a third "general purpose technology" of the last 200 years, alongside the steam engine and electricity.

Anton Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023)

I began this book with great hope - after all, Nicholas Carr, whose books on the internet (The Shallows) and social media (Superbloom) I have found so perceptive, had endorsed it. Alas, the work disappointed. Perhaps I was at fault, but I was never able to tap into its argument. A Web reads like an extended piece in the Feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - allusive, polemical, serpentine. The book prioritizes phenomenological observations about the nature of the web, which it renders in often poetical-paradoxical phrases and pretentious words. Barba-Kay provides scant evidence for his claims. He tends toward hyperbole (only "the bomb" - i.e. the nuclear bomb - rivals and parallels the web in eschatological significance). Not only did I not find myself persuaded by most of these big claims; I didn't even find them particularly arresting. After scant 100 pages, I put the book aside - something I rarely do. Given Carr's high standing in my eyes, though, maybe I'll look up reviews of the book and see if any of them can show me what I missed.

Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1984)

This book was a huge - and very pleasant - surprise for me. I read it in connection with my course (and interest in) Media & Minds. I thought I had read or at least knew of the most important works in the field of media ecology - McLuhan, Ong, Goody, Postman, etc. No Sense of Place had only recently registered in my awareness. So my expectation was that it would, at most, fill in a few new details. Instead, what I found was a book that not only made a new, and very innovative, argument about the impact of television. Much more broadly, I think the book qualifies as a significant contribution to social theory (and it turns out it's been cited more than 8,000 times). Meyrowitz does this by combining Erving Goffman with Marshall McLuhan. Goffman, about whom only the title of his most famous book - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - had given me an inkling of his ideas, turns out to be more complex and interesting than I had realized. His theory is that we are performing on many stages (not just one, as I had thought), while also retreating to a "back stage" for rehearsal of our "front stage" roles and for rest. So it turns out that Goffman's theory is much more about roles than I had suspected, and hence is also relevant to explaining group formation. But Goffman's theory is static, and this is where McLuhan comes in. Meyrowitz argues that new media change informational flows, as with the introduction of TV, thereby changing "situations." These define roles, and so as situations change, so too do the borders between front stage and back stage. Meyrowitz applies this quite persuasively to explain many of the changes in American society since the 1960s, thus offering a worthy alternative to Ronald Inglehart's account, which revolves around the shift from material to post-material values. Just as Postman's Amusing Ourselves made arguments about TV that now also seem remarkably prescient about our digital age, so too do Meyrowitz's arguments regularly seem to anticipate changes we are now living through.