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Lädt ... How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014)von Steven Johnson
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. This book connects inventions with social movements in a way that formed many moments of epiphany for me. It was delightful and thought-provoking, but it's not a gripping book; I had to force myself back into it a few times because the excitement wasn't quite there (and I was reading Six Of Crows at the time), but every time I went back in I was glad I did. It may give you a sense that, sometimes, the world really does make sense, and it will make history seem just a little bit smaller and more closely intertwined. Like James Burke, whose “Connections” series ran on BBC and PBS in the late 1970s, Steven Johnson is interested in how one thing leads to another. Ideas are built on other ideas, often in surprising ways. Johnson narrated his own BBC and PBS series, and the book based on that series, “How We Got to Now,” was published in 2014. Easier to follow than Burke, Johnson concentrates on six areas of discovery: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light. The discovery of glass, by accident, led to windows, lenses, fiberglass and eventually modern electronics. "The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass," he writes. As for cold, for many centuries nobody gave any thought to creating artificial cold, although artificial heat in the form of fire had been around for a long time. But then they started transporting ice in ships, which led to ice boxes, refrigerators, frozen food and air conditioning. Discoveries lead in unexpected directions, Johnson points out. Because of air conditioning, population centers in the United States have moved south, from New York, Chicago and Detroit to Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. Telephones made skyscrapers possible. Because of barcodes, big stores like Walmart, Lowes and Target came to be. We celebrate inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as if their genius was unique. Yet if they hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have. And in many cases somebody else did but never got the credit. Truly unique ideas are rare.
While we appreciate it in the abstract, few of us pause to grasp the miracles of modern life, from artificial light to air conditioning, as Steven Johnson puts it in the excellent How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, “how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera.” Understanding how these everyday marvels first came to be, then came to be taken for granted, not only allows us to see our familiar world with new eyes — something we are wired not to do — but also lets us appreciate the remarkable creative lineage behind even the most mundane of technologies underpinning modern life. Bearbeitet/umgesetzt inAuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Ein neuer Blick auf die Geschichte und Macht großer Ideen In dieser bebilderten Darstellung sechs großer technologischer Neuerungen, die unsere moderne Welt auf vielfältige Weise prägen, zeichnet Steven Johnson die Geschichte der Innovation über die Jahrhunderte nach, indem er bedeutsame Facetten des modernen Alltags (seien es Kühleinrichtungen, Uhren oder Brillengläser) von ihrer Erfindung durch Hobbyforscher, Amateure und Unternehmer bis zu ihren unerwarteten historischen Konsequenzen verfolgt. Das Buch steckt voller überraschender Schilderungen zufälliger genialer Entdeckungen und brillanter Fehlschläge - wie die Geschichte des französischen Verlegers, der den Phonographen schon vor Edison erfunden hatte, oder die des Hollywood-Stars, der zur Entwicklung der Technik hinter WLAN und Bluetooth beitrug. Dabei deckt Johnson immer wieder unerwartete Verbindungen zwischen scheinbar unzusammenhängenden Feldern auf: So ermöglichte die Erfindung der Klimatisierung gewaltige Wanderungsbewegungen von Menschen, nämlich in Millionenstädte wie Dubai oder Phoenix, die ansonsten praktisch unbewohnbar wären; Pendeluhren trugen dazu bei, die Industrielle Revolution auszulösen; sauberes Wasser erwies sich als Voraussetzung für die Produktion von Computer-Chips. Die Erfindung der Zukunft ist die Geschichte jener kollaborativen Netzwerke, die unsere moderne Welt schufen - informativ, oft provokativ und immer unterhaltsam. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)338.064Social sciences Economics Production Efficiency Effect Of InnovationKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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The book is a fun romp across connected technologies and how they enabled each other leading to deep changes in culture and society. ( )