Predictions of the digital age

Book: Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite

Author: John Brockman

Published: 1996 (HardWired)

Pages: 335

Irony is reading a physical book all about how the world is going digital and how we should adapt or risk getting left behind.

What Brockman did was gather up all his influential friends and acquaintances from the industry, sat them down one by one, and interviewed them about where they thought the Internet and the World Wide Web were headed and what they and the world at large needed to do about it.

And then he typed it and sent it off to get bound in paper and glue and cardboard and to sell on one of the platforms most of his interviewees predicted would be dead by now (to be fair, they’re getting sort of right).

Reading fifteen-year-old predictions about the Internet feels a little like reading Nostradamus; it’s a faddish way of retroactively proving that psychics really do exist. Although the people interviewed for this book were far more actively engaged in the innovations they talked about, their projections were still vague enough to apply correctly to what the Internet has become without knowing if 2011’s Internet is exactly what they were thinking in 1996.

A good bit of why I liked reading this was so I could nod my head and mentally mark off what we’ve innovated from these Suggestions of the Future.

• Interaction and personalization will always be king in a medium that’s simultaneously broadcaster and audience.
• As long as we have such a thing as technology, we will have people worrying about whether or not we’re spending too much time on it.
• Ease of access, cheapening of speed, and building of communities are the steadiest foundations on which to build Internet interest.
• Nobody will ever care about interactive TV.

I really, really wish Brockman had hosted round table talks/arguments and just recorded those verbatim, or at least left his questions in so on the page his interviews would get some of that interaction action they all yap on about. That way he would’ve caught some great arguments that would have taken all these sentiments, which were thought-provoking but difficult to get through in big chunks that said basically the same thing.

“You sly dog! You’ve got me monolouging!”  

Anyway, this was a sort of interesting book, but it’s by no means necessary.

Why I'll never go to med school

Book: Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures

Author: Vincent Lam

Published: 2007 (Weinstein Books)

Pages: 337 (not counting glossary)

Don’t choke my brain with complicated procedures I have to look up when the whole point is that shit has to get done quickly to save some dude’s life. I WILL skim and I WILL not get a word of your drama.

Whew. Okay. Off my chest, so to speak.

Except for the one or two stories mentioned above, Dr. Lam writes perfectly serviceable literary fiction about his other job as an emergency physician. Reading about the medical profession always scares me while sympathizing with it at the same time because it reminds me how sleep-deprived they all are, from their decision to go to med school onward.

But these stories put human, if somewhat bland, faces on stuff like trying to keep up a relationship with another med school hopeful (that was the first story and my favorite), getting quarantined in the SARS epidemic, and dealing with psychotic patients and the night shift. And dealing with psychotic patients on the night shift. Nothing unexpected, no little inside details that really stuck out as epitomes of anything, but easily written.

Dr. Lam’s real life sounds a lot more exciting, what with the emergency physician thing and being medically trained in Canada and being the youngest writer to win the Giller Prize for fiction (2006) and coming from an expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam. I’d read the shit out of that biography.

The book flap does say that his first novel, a “multigenerational family saga set in Saigon during the Vietnam War” is “forthcoming.” Great! Is four years too soon to start bugging him about that?

Also also also, a word of advice about ensemble medical fiction: DO NOT READ ERIC SEGAL’S DOCTORS. Not if you have my impatience for Bad Things Happen to Saintly People, total black/white value systems, and terrible, terrible dialogue. It’s like a soap opera on a bad week for over 400 pages. …And I totally read it like three times over four or five years but that was only because I could never convince myself that it could be as bad as I remembered. But it was. Always.     

What a buck (and 7% sales tax) can buy you

Book: This Must Be the Place

Author: Anna Winger

Published: 2008 (Riverhead Books)

Pages: 303

What do you get when you put a fading, discontent actor who now earns all his fame from being the voice of Tom Cruise in the German versions of his films and a fading, discontent wife of a business man who recently lost her baby and managed to convince herself to follow her husband overseas but now barely wants to get out of her bathtub in the same Berlin apartment complex?

Answer: a good peek into the workings of dubbing Hollywood movies into native languages, a small roundabout way on how porn can save a local economy, a radically optimistic plan to go back to L.A. on Tom Cruise’s approval, a slowly discovered neighborhood, a lopsided crush, a midlife crisis that doesn’t know where to go when it’s already got a sports car and younger girlfriend, layers of wallpaper, another pregnancy, a post-war German who transcends the cliché of discovering his Jewish roots, and a very good reason why the Dollar Tree should advertise its book section more.

Duh.