Two Lessons from an Earlier Book by Michael Lewis

I was looking over some of my “earlier” First Friday Book Synopsis handouts (some of them were not as thorough as my current handouts), and I ran across the one on the early Michael Lewis book:  NEXT:  The Future Just Happened (2001).

Here are two excerpts from the book:

In the long run the Internet will become invisible and ubiquitous, and no one will spend a minute thinking about its social effects any more that they now think about the social effects of electricity…
I stopped worrying over the social consequences of the Internet and began simply to watch what was actually happening on the Internet.  Inadvertently it was telling us what we wanted to become.   

and

When capitalism encourages ever more rapid change, children enjoy one big advantage over adults:  they haven’t decided who they are.

And, here are two lessons.

Lesson #1 – the more we grow accustomed to new technology, the less we are “enamored” and “perplexed,” and the more we simply use the technology in an effective and productive manner.

In other words, the purpose of technology is not to make us “stare and wonder” at the technology itself, but to take advantage of what the technology enables us to do.

Lesson #2 – The youngest among us will have an easier time doing this, because they have so very little to “unlearn.”

Another reason to envy the young.