Readings of 2014, April Edition, Part 1

The Circle by Dave Eggers:

What happens when social media becomes so deeply ingrained with our day-to-day life that we begin paying our bills, voting, and even (literally) display every moment of every day for the world to see?

The Circle documents a new Circler's(that's what the employees call themselves), Mae, rise through the company the most influential and controversial company on the planet.

The Circle's intentions begin innocently enough; they begin as essentially a mixture of PayPal and Facebook, which requires a verified social security number to fight online fraud. Mae begins at the company a few years into it's life, and The Circle is now even more deeply ingrained into everyone's life, which Mae is slightly torn about.

As the story goes on, this only increases, as The Circle takes the Silicon-Valley buzzword, transparency to another level; Mae actually begins wearing a video camera, which documents every second of her day for the world to see.

I am not going to give any more spoilers out for the book, because I believe that you should go read it. It is an amazing insight into some of today's fictional technological and moral problems that could very well be the facts of tomorrow.

Dot Complicated by Randi Zuckerberg:

Yes, that Zuckerberg.

Where The Circle focuses on future fictional implications of the growth social media and technology, Randi Zuckerberg focuses on the present: beneficial, as well as negative.

Like I alluded to earlier, Randi Zuckerberg is Mark Zuckerberg's sister, as well as one of Facebook's first employees, where she led the marketing efforts.

Throughout the book, it is apparent that Randi is torn between all of the benefits that social media has to offer(connecting people, sharing of information, etc) and all of its obvious and subtle drawbacks(never being truly present, feeling the need to document all aspects of our life for the world to see, trying to maintain multiple online personalities, and the need to learn a constantly evolving online etiquette).

Again, I won't ruin the whole book for you. I would definitely recommend reading both... there are some very interesting connections to be made between the two.