Every year, perhaps even every week, there is some new gadget, device, service, or other digital offering intended to make our lives easier, better, more fun, or more instantaneous--making it that much harder to question how anything digital can be bad for us. Digital has created some wonderful things and we can hardly imagine life without them. But digital-the most relentless social and economic juggernaut humanity has unleashed in centuries-is also destroying much we had taken for granted. And what is your place in this brave new world? In Digital Is Destroying Everything, futurist and digital marketing consultant Andrew Edwards tours the "blasted heath" digital is leaving behind and takes a fearless look at the troubled landscape that may lie ahead. The book is not, despite its title, a dystopian rant against all things digital and technological. Instead, expect to find a lively investigation into the ways digital has opened us to new and sometimes quite wonderful experiences, driven down costs for consumers, and given information a chance to be free. But the book also takes a clear-eyed look at many of the good (and sometimes bad) things-businesses and behaviors-digital has destroyed, and how the world may be diminished, compromised, and altered forever in its wake. This tour of the effects of digital technologies on our lives is sure to raise questions, touch a nerve, and enlighten even the most dedicated digital enthusiasts.
Foreword by Rand Schulman A Note on the Use of "Digital" in This Book 1: Digital is Destroying Everything 2: Crazy Train: Digital is Destroying the Music Industry 3: The Bezos Bauble: Digital is Destroying the Newsprint Industry 4: The Business Case: When Digital Destroys Digital 5: Undigital, Unemployed: Digital is Destroying the Job Market 6: The Lonely Screen: Digital is Destroying Human Interaction 7: Campus-Killing: Digital is Destroying Education 8: The Downtown Next Time: Digital is Destroying Urban Life in America 9: Oversharing and Undercounting: Digital is Destroying Rational Discourse and the Democratic Process 10: Books, Bath and Beyond: Digital is Destroying Retail 11: Digital Has Destroyed Authoritarian Rule (or Has It)? 12: Obsessive Compulsive: Digital is Destroying our Will to Create Anything Not Digital 13: Digital is Destroying Financial Services 14: Invaders From Earth: Digital is Destroying the Professions (and more) 15: Lesser Pursuits Destroyed by Digital 16: It's Worse Than You Thought: Digital is Destroying Privacy 17: Maybe It's All Bullshit 18: Don't Read This First
