Stop what you’re doing…

and read this book.

Maybe it’s because I enjoy looking back at history and examining how we got where we are with a particular topic. Or maybe it’s because I have been making the comparison between the Internet and electricity availability for years. But “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google” is great work which seems to let us see the future. We’ve been here before. We know what is coming to some extent. And so, can’t we use that knowledge to help shape our decisions…learning from history?

My favorite quote so far is the last paragraph in the first chapter (I’ll excerpt or brevity) :

“Many of the characteristics that define American society came into being only in the aftermath of electrification….Today we think of these developments as permanent features of our society. But that’s an illusion. They’re the by products of a particular set of economic trade-offs that reflected, in large measure, the technologies of the time.”

Fantastic book bringing unprecedented clarity to our past and potential future.

Soon, we’ll all be living in the cloud. Oh, and I found some videos of Nicolas Carr, he author, on YouTube. Here is just one.