Fans pick 100 books like TechnoStress

If you're looking for a book that captures the zeitgeist of contemporary relationships, here it is, well before the reign of Facebook. Calling upon social commentary, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, feminist theory, anthropology, family theory, and linguistics, the author presents a broad-based, scholarly, and sobering analysis of the toxic trends and processes in our society which are casting Americans adrift from their emotional and psychic moorings, and leaving them unable to initiate or sustain meaningful relationships.

Because of the ever-growing impersonal nature of our society, it has become more difficult to begin and sustain intimate relationships. Indeed, it seems as if modern life is represented by a series of relationships of convenience that often lack substance. These kinds of insights make this book very appealing. The author contends that we're losing our overall ability to be involved in meaningful relationships and instead are relegated to something less. Most important, the author… show more.

This book took me and the business world by storm. Wurman truly nailed a feeling that was widely experienced but had not yet been named. He explained how information anxiety resulted from constant overstimulation, especially when we don't have the time or opportunity to make an orderly transition from one idea to the next.

He explained how no one functions well when figuratively gasping for breath. Learning, he said, requires ‘way-stations’ where we have the chance to stop and think about an idea or subject matter before moving on to the next. So true! I particularly like his analogy that basing your view of the world on isolated events is like basing you knowledge of music on what you hear in an elevator.

Most important to me are the five ways to organize information as laid out in the book. If you're wondering, they include by category, time, location,… show more.

To me, this book is a classic, and isolating 'attention' as the real currency of business and individuals is pure genius. The author observes that attention actually has many of the same attributes as money. People who don’t have it want it. People who have it, often want it even more. You can trade attention, and you can purchase it.

I like the way the author explains how we covet our time and resources in relation to attention: people work to preserve and extend what they already have, and so caller ID and email-filtering software are popular because they screen out whatever might divert one's attention."

The authors note that similar to airplane seats and fresh food, attention is a perishable commodity. They cite Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, who proclaimed that, "What information consumes is rather obvious; it consumes the attention of recipients. Hence, a wealth of information… show more.

We are all creatures of habit and many of our habits are akin to what the author calls rituals. This is heavy-duty stuff, and well worth reading. In our modern hectic work-a-day world, too often we lack rituals that could be sustaining and rewarding. Why is this important? Rituals can add richness and meaning to our daily lives. For example, the author says a walk in the park or lightning a candle at certain times of the day enables us to reconnect with others and with our inner self.

During a time when many of us live miles and miles from our families and might not even know our neighbors, rituals provide us with a feeling of belonging. They enhance our sense of who we are, personally and professionally, as well as individually and collectively. The great news is that rituals can easily be adapted to suit occasions and events… show more.

By exploring today’s rapidly changing world, Friedman helps you take a step back and consider how we might be able to live life at a reasonable pace. Thank You For Being Late serves as a guide for how to respond to the speed of change around us. By understanding how the world is changing through the possibilities and dangers of Moore’s Law (technology and the internet), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change), Friedman encourages us to consider our own adaptability. Rather than complaining and being static as individuals, Friedman suggests we need to embrace change and look at what is in our control to adapt, learn, look forward and still achieve what we want to.

This book is full of “wow” moments. The author describes the history of numerous inventions to show the ingenuity of Chinese civilization. Some of these inventions are well known, like paper and the compass. But most of them come as a surprise. Until about two hundred years ago, China was far ahead of the rest of the world in most types of technology. In some respects, such as agricultural tools and steel smelting, China was two thousand years ahead of Europe. When you read this book, you will realize that for most of history, Europe was like a marginal third-world society and China was the center of things.  

Palfrey is not just a known authority on internet law and emerging media, but also the former head of the prep school Phillips Academy, Andover; the former executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, a research center that studies cyberspace and internet-related legal issues; the head of the MacArthur Foundation; and, I learned before speaking with him, a great-great-grandson of Teddy Roosevelt. This book, newly updated, delves into the myriad permutations of what it means to grow up in a digital world, with your every move captured and publicized. Yes, it focuses on children growing up digital, but it will be of interest to anyone who has questions and concerns about the future of privacy—meaning, just about all of us. 

This Thing Between Us is a strange, mesmerizing, and oddly funny story about one man’s grief and how it leads to an invasive, evil force penetrating our world from the beyond. In part, it’s a haunted house story, but the ghost is in the machine—specifically a smart speaker named “Itza,” which is Moreno’s version of Alexa. I had the idea to a write a haunted house novel in which the house is haunted by a computer, but Gus beat me to it, and did it ten times better than I could have. You won’t read anything like this one, I promise. 

Diamandis’ book is one of hope, sort of like applying Kurzweil’s futurism to pure business. And like his friend Kurzweil, the author’s enthusiasm is contagious: one emerges from this book ready to march forth and change the world.

Peter insists that while we may look back at the successes of Zuckerberg or Musk, the best is yet to come; that looking back a few decades from now, people will think: “this was a formidable time to set out and start a business”.

Indeed that was the case at the first stages of every industrial revolution, and the 4th should bear no different. Unless entrepreneurship is suffocated by Big Tech incumbents and overly cautious regulators. 

My admiration for this book is demonstrated by the way in which I quite shamelessly ripped off its title for my own. It has been said that America is the only nation that began perfect and hoped to improve. The engine of that improvement, from the earliest days of the Republic, had been new technologies but by the middle of the pre-Civil War period some Americans began to realize that the “improvement” they had unleashed was beginning to erode the very “perfection” that they had hoped to enshrine in the nation’s foundation. Writers, artists, and creative intellectuals in general are society’s canaries in the mine shaft, and the great names of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, George Innes, Charles Sheeler, and their colleagues—attempted to describe, understand, and perhaps heal the destructive effects of the machine. As Marx concludes, “what was a grim possibility… show more.