Lloyd Shepherd
Monitoring the Changes
The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World
By Nick Harkaway
John Murray 280pp £13.99 order from our bookshop
Between the elections of Tony Blair and David Cameron, the world changed. Built on a set of computer network protocols, a parade of technologies and services blinked into existence that now seem essential threads in the fabric of our society: mobile data networks, Wikipedia, Twitter, Google, YouTube, blogging, Facebook, Lolcats.
You don’t get that kind of change without a lot of comment. Ironically, given that it’s an environment composed entirely of data packets, the Internet has spawned a great many books. Computing has binary logic gates at its core, so it is apt that almost all these books adopt rigid
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