The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires
Language: English
Published by Random House USA Inc, 2010
- Hardcover
- Used
Seller: World of Books Inc, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.World of Books Inc
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Add to basketItem description from seller
It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry--from the telephone to radio to film--once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this path-breaking audiobook, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Web--the entire flow of American information--come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of the master switch? Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today's great information powers--Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T--Wu uncovers a time-honored pattern in which invention begets industry and industry begets empire. He shows how a battle royal for the Internet's future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out. Fascinating, balanced, and rigorous--a tour de force. --The New York Review of Books Entertaining. There's a sharp insight and a surprising fact on nearly every page of Wu's masterful survey. --The Boston Globe.…
Seller Inventory # CIN0307269930A
- Title
- The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires
- Author
- Tim Wu
- Publisher
- Random House USA Inc
- Publication year
- 2010
- Condition
- Fair
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0307269930
- ISBN 13
- 9780307269935
As Wus sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth centuryradio, telephone, television, and filmwas born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBCs founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.
Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empirea progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alikeWu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of todays great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internets future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.
Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age,The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.
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About the Author
Tim Wu is an author, a policy advocate, and a professor at Columbia University. In 2006, he was recognized as one of fifty leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in the following year, 01238 magazine listed him as one of Harvard's one hundred most influential graduates. He writes for Slate, where he won the Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Forbes. He is a fellow of the New America Foundation and the chairman of the media reform organization Free Press. He lives in New York.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
World of Books Inc
Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since March 23, 2026
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