Age of Context

Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy

By: Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Narrated by: Jeffrey Kafer

Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

In 2006, co-authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote Naked Conversations, a book that persuaded businesses to embrace what we now call social media. Six years later they have teamed up again to report that social media is but one of five converging forces that promise to change virtually every aspect of our lives. You know these other forces already: mobile, data, sensors and location-based technology. Combined with social media they form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends. Armed with that knowledge our personal devices can anticipate what we'll need next and serve us better than a butler or an executive assistant. The resulting convergent superforce is so powerful that it is ushering in an era the authors call the Age of Context.

In this new era, our devices know when to wake us up early because it snowed last night; they contact the people we are supposed to meet with to warn them we're running late. They even find content worth watching on television. They also promise to cure cancer and make it harder for terrorists to do their damage. Astoundingly, in the coming age you may only receive ads you want to see. Scoble and Israel have spent more than a year researching this book. They report what they have learned from interviewing more than a hundred pioneers of the new technology and by examining hundreds of contextual products.

What does it all mean? How will it change society in the future? The authors are unabashed tech enthusiasts, but as they write, an elephant sits in the living room of our book and it is called privacy. We are entering a time when our technology serves us best because it watches us; collecting data on what we do, who we speak with, what we look at. There is no doubt about it: Big Data is watching you. The time to lament the loss of privacy is over. The authors argue that the time is right to demand options that enable people to reclaim some portions of that privacy.

©2013 Shel Israel (P)2013 Shel Israel

Shittiest book ever

This book reads like one long commercial for google ... Very long

Awful, horrible, awful, horrible

Disappointing. Superficial.

What disappointed you about Age of Context?

Disappointing. Superficial.

Because there is so much available free content -- posts, blogs, tweets, etc, consumers have high expectations for the quality of paid content. If a consumer invests time and money in an audio book, he should expect deeper analysis and insights than what can be found in the average social media rant or rave.

I give it at least two stars because Scoble and Israel introduce some major forces working today to fundamentally alter how we interact with our devices, our data and each other. But the book disappoints because it is not fleshed out with insights and details to challenge preconceptions are build cases for alternate perspectives. An entire section of the Google Glass chapter is devoted to recalling how the authors shared a prototype of Glass with strangers and how the strangers smiled when they tried it. They smiled after 60 seconds of trying it?!? That's what you got? That entire experiment can be reduced to a single post. Why did they smile? And didn't anyone frown? This kind of lightweight journalism is abundant on the free Internet so there's no need to pay for it.

Just searching the surface

I have a strong feeling this book was written to bring sales, increase Rackspace brand awareness and improve authors financial well-being. It is a very watered down book. Unless you've been living under the rock in the past 5 to 10 years this book does not really provide any details that you would usually get by reading technology blogs and books. However if you are not familiar with IoT, quantified self movement, contextual advertising or any other trends in technology this book will be a good introduction. I had to listen it at 2x speed.

A pile of garbage trash heap

Would you try another book from Robert Scoble and Shel Israel and/or Jeffrey Kafer?

Ever hope today is garbage day this book is trash. Based on a premise that is sideways at best. Edumacated idiots writing books. Just cant do much worse than this.