Related to a PBS special, this book is oddly flat, especially considering the interesting innovations and conceptual foundations it deals with. It took me several weeks to finish, which is rare for me - I kept putting it down and procrastinating getting back to it.
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson
ISBN: 9781594632969
Finished November 24, 2014
Our six innovations are:
Glass
Cold
Sound
Clean
Time
and
Light
The idea is that while individual "gee whiz" inventions like lights or phonographs or detergent are really great and all, what really matters to society and the development of culture and technological advances are the underlying relations between scientific concepts, and that the area of the "near possible" - the stuff that is just close enough to current technology and social mores to imagine - drives the great majority of the underlying stuff we all take for granted as part of a modern world.
Interesting idea, but somehow the execution of it just fell a bit flat for me. I don't know if it was because it's tied-in to a television series, and the passion and energy went towards the visuals and the presentation there, but it just didn't click with me.
Still, really nifty information, and that concept of the "near possible" is a newly named one for me, and one I'm going to keep in mind.
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