[icernet] Book Review: A Real Look At The Virtual World

[Arul Selvan]

  The Internet hype is dead, long live the Internet. That seems to be 
the message that keeps flashing through Get A Digital Life: An Internet 
Reality Check, like popup windows that keep re-appearing on your screen 
as soon as you close them down. But whether you are a retailer, 
manufacturer or in the service industry, ignore this message at your own 
peril. For, far from running down the power of the World Wide Web, 
authors Jim Carroll and Rick Broadhead are passionate believers in the 
power it holds to transform your world. After all, the passion that went 
out of fashion after the dotcom disaster (that made megabillions look 
like small change and actually turned them into it), the pendulum swung 
to the other extreme. The same media that had made heroes out of 
idea-millionaires who “created” virtual wealth and destroyed real money 
in “Internet time” (another concept that the authors delight in 
debunking), were now declaring that the Internet was finished.

What makes the book an interesting read is the clinically dispassionate 
manner in which the duo conduct the post-mortem of the boom and doom 
years of the Net without making villains or heroes out of the characters 
that played questionable roles in pumping up the bubble. Clearly a 
product of long hours of painstaking research spread over more than a 
year, the book is liberally peppered with interesting statistics, facts 
and samples of fiction that were taken for fact while the “idea virus” 
was on a rampage.


Get A Digital Life—An Internet Reality Check
by Jim Carrol & Rick Broadhead; Macmillan India; Rs 198; Pp 221

Source:
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=25243