Book Group Presentations

Today in class two groups presented on their book reviews. The first group that presented reviewed a book called Future Perfect by Steven Johnson. This focus of this book is about peer to peer networking, how it works, and how it could be helping or harming our society. One thing that they talked about when it came to peer to peer networking was the ways in which it changed journalism. Journalism as a peer to peer network helped information management. What this means is that the news that you care about is probably what you are most likely to pay attention to. The example used in class was if your child scrapped her knee, you are more likely to care about that than a bombing in an overseas country. A better example of this, I believe would be that we as Americans care about new of our troops more so than the news of another countries troops. The group also mentioned how peer supported news makes the news cheap to come by. This can be seen by people uploading real-time YouTube videos, and live tweets and other social networks. A question that the group brings forth is “are the internet and the web pushing us into a positive direction.” The answer is that it all depends on your view of what is positive and what is negative. They talked about example of peer to peer networking which is torrent files, Wikipedia, or any social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Another aspect of a model of peer to peer networking that the group mentions was centralized networking, which is all intelligence that lays in the center of the networks, which made it easy to attack.

They concluded their review of this book by mentioning some examples of what peer innovation are. These include a Kickstarter which creates peer backing one another and crowd funding. Another peer innovation would be the prize back challenge and these sparked innovation whereas patents slowed down innovation.

Finally it can be concluded that peer to peer networking leads to more participation and thus more profit. This is because the internet and web is decentralized and has peer to peer architecture, and this allows anyone to voice ideas and opinions.

This group did a good job laying out all of the information provided in the book and gave a good understanding of the principles that need to be taken away from Johnson’s work.