And The World Changed: 
Life In The Digital Reality

1 - The Good Old Days: Analog Remembrances

2 - Pavlov’s Promise: Advertising Freeness 

3 - Unplanned Obsolesce: Crappy Immortality

4 - Jet Fighters Over North Vietnam: Turning Off The Switches

5 - The Immorality Option: Stealing More Than A Politician

6 - Hemmingway Redux: Dead Men Beating You At Your Own Game

7 - Boiling The Frog Slowly: Content Versus Container

8 - The Good New Days: Avoiding the Digital Scrapheap

1 - The Good Old Days: Analog Remembrances

The year is 1900, and we're peeping in on the lives of Mr. and Ms. Everyman. For them, life is good. You can get the latest news from around the world, delivered to your doorstep, the oldest of it only weeks old! They live in a middle-sized town, and are proud to be well read. As Grandpa (1850) Everyman said, to be a quality person, you need to read quality things. They get several of the top fiction magazines, including Saturday Evening Post and Town and Country, none of those penny dreadfuls for them, no siree! Mr. Everyman gets to the big city twice a year, and goes to a top bookstore to buy 5-10 books to read back home. Some classy stuff, like Kipling or Twain for him, some quality romances for Ms. Everyman, and a few adventure books for his kid brother. (His kid brother doesn't tell him about the penny dreadfuls he keeps stashed away so his snobby big brother won't lose his temper!) Dozens of publishing companies vie for Mr. Everyman's reading dollar. And when Mr. Everyman is in the Big City, he will fit in a concert and a play before he comes back. Yes, Sir! Look at the great entertainment available in these grand new times. If he could just move to the Big City, he could go to concerts every week! He could even go to a Baseball game. What a life he could live......Oh well, he makes do by playing Parlor Games with Ms. Everyman or listen to her play sheet music (poorly) on the piano, and taking kid brother out to fish or play catch. A good well-informed life...

Flash forward to 1954. Another peep into Mr. and Ms. Everyman's lives....
Mr. Everyman is working at the factory, pulling down good wages. He uses the money to buy all sorts of entertainment for himself and Ms. Everyman (and her kid brother). Mr. Everyman likes to read, but not the old, slow stuff that Grandpa (1900) Everyman bought when he was young. Besides he doesn't have the time to read as much as he'd like. The only one who seems to have enough time to read is Kid Brother, and all he wants to read are those stupid Comic Books! Either that or play pinball. Mr. Everyman grew up listening to Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio, and watching the Three Stooges and 2 reeler Westerns at the theater on Saturdays, like most of his friends. Now, he's seen a Television, and is slowly saving up to buy one for the family. Just think, two whole channels of entertainment, pictures instead of just sound, all for free! On the other hand, that new High-Fidelity record player lets you play the latest in music, and it sound so real it's almost like being there. Or maybe a radio for the car. You can the take a trip with musical accompaniment. Oh well it's just a matter of priorities. Mr. Everyman know that in a few years, he'll own all of them. What a life!, he dreams. A baby motion picture theater in his own home, a concert hall as well, playing the latest in Sinatra, and a soundtrack to drive by. And if he wants to go out, he can watch the new color wide-screen movies that are coming out, along with Ms. Everyman and her Kid Brother... Oh well, until then he'll play Dominoes, Monopoly and Scrabble with Ms. Everyman and her Kid Brother, listen to Bob Hope on the radio, and slip in the occasional mystery novel for reading....

It's now 2008. Let's take a look at today's Mr. and Ms. Everyman....
Mr. Everyman is sitting in traffic on a Thursday, commuting from work to home. Tired of listening to ads on the stereo radio in the car, he turns off the radio and calls Ms. Everyman on his cellphone, telling her he'll be an extra 30 minutes late. He mulls between plugging in his I-pod music player with 200 hours of commercial-free music on it and putting on an audio book on the audio CD player. He decides not to get started on another audio book, because he probably won't get around to finishing during his commutes before the week-end, and nobody wants to ride in a car listening to the middle of a book. He settles on an old favorite of his Dad. He continues to wind through traffic listening to Grateful Dead's Hell In A Bucket - at least he's enjoying the ride... He muses "maybe I should get Sirius", 100+ channels, even more variety than his I-pod, only $15 or so a month. Well...maybe in the next car...
Mr.Everyman gets home. After a hurried meal, his kid brother staying with him goes to his room and cranks up 50 Cent. Mr. Everyman yell at him to turn down that miserable crap, he can't hear himself think. The volume gets turned down to a low thump. Mr. Everyman then looks at the media center. He's got over 100 movies on the shelf that he's never seen, and 900 that he's seen at least once. Plus a 150 live concerts, and who know how many old TV episodes. He knows it's north of 100 different shows, but he has no idea how many episodes total. He asks Ms. Everyman what she wants to do tonight. She says she just wants to curl up with a book. Ok, he says, knowing that he has 300 books on his e-book reader that he hasn't gotten around to reading yet, and decides to check tomorrow’s weather and news headlines, and then catch a sporting event on cable TV. The low thump in the kid brother's room is now replaced with low bangs and explosions. He's playing Crysis again. Mr. Everyman nostalgically remembers having time for videogames.
Firing up his computer, he goes to the NOAA government weather site, then shifts over to the CNN website. The world is mismanaged as usual. He pops over to MobileRead to see if RSE has gotten off his duff to write the latest Red adventure. Nope, not yet. Then 10 minutes looking at the latest gadgets. Feeling embarrassed for having wasted 30 minutes, he powers off the computer and goes over to the media center and fires up the widescreen monitor and the surround sound unit. Ah, for the good old days of "57 channels and nothing on". It's now over 200 channels and nothing on. He spins through the schedule listing for the time slot and finds 2 basketball games and a hockey game. No baseball for 3 months yet. Hmm. Well, the local team will probably lose, but they are the home team, and the game is still very close, even though it's half over. So he settles in and watches the rest of the game. Maybe when he retires, he'll have the time to catch up on things...And he wonders, what did people do with all that time 100 years ago....  

What did they do indeed?

Welcome to the Digital World.

Everything (with one exception) in the 2008 scene above is dependent on some form of a computer. And the computer world is a total different world than the analog world of your forefathers. Different rules, different ideas, different plans, futures and ways of achieving goals. And no old experiences that help make sense of it all. Just one ad-hoc fix after another, with people hoping it'll all settle out in the end. Guess what? It won't settle out. You will have to settle it out for yourself. Don't be suprised if your settlement with the Digital World doesn't match anyone's else's. That's part of the Digital World, too.
I am an old geezer in the digital world. I played with the first delivered all-in-one home computer in 1977 (the Commodore PET, which shipped the first demo units before the Apple II or the Radio Shack TRS-80). I've coded the first generation of computers - the mainframes - when programmers were programmers and users were afraid. But it's not just technical chops that matter. It's being able to look at the Big Picture and being able to make a whole out of the entire sweep of change. To look at the forest, not just the trees. That's the purpose of this book. To show you the forest. And the prairies, the mountains, and the oceans. The context, if you will.
Even at that, I can't (and won't) cover everything. The best I can do is show you how to explore for yourselves, and make your own maps and decisions. I know some of your will thing I'm being too technical, others will sneer at my simplicity, or my arrogance for even trying. Shrug. Somebody's got to push the wind through the Tuba. Maybe you can write this book better than I can. Have at it. I'm not Superman. I'm not even a professional writer. Just someone seeing a job that needs to be done and doing it. 
Remember, in the new world 1 + 1 = 10. There is no 2. And the rules that made the analog world work smoothly can be nothing but sand in the gears of the digital world. And vice versa. 
The shape of this book is as follows. The introduction that you are reading. An orientation, if you will. A series of chapters, each covering an important concept of the Digital World, showing how it disrupts the analog world. Every one is essential to having the base to make your own settlement with the Digital World. The last chapter will tie all the previous chapters into one answer. It's my answer. You can follow it, or not. With the provided background, you can make your own answer. At least you'll understand some of the reasons why the Digital world and the analog world clash. And the limits of any answer.
One final note. This is a pro bono publico work. Feel free to disseminate as you wish. But please leave my name on it, as I wrote it, warts and all.