Book Project-The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media by Jose Van Dijck

My search began on Amazon where I conducted a search with the term "information society" and then shifted the sort filter to be based on "new and popular."  After finding very few intriguing results this way, I clicked on the "technology" hyperlink listed on the left side of the page under related topics which brought me to a selection of information society-related books of which I found to be much more interesting choices.  I managed to narrow my search down to three candidates after much deliberation:

The Culture of Connectivity:  A Critical History of Social Media by Jose Van Dijck

The Human Face of Big Data by Rick Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt

The New Digital Age:  Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

Besides all starting with the word "The," these books all shared a fair amount in common, from price to reviews to page length, and most importantly in terms of how they tied to the idea of the information society.  This, along with the fact that the subject of each appealed to me personally, made me have to delve deeper into my multi-layered selection process.  At this point I was pretty sold on the Van Dijck book as I much prefer his cut-and-dry, straightforward, mostly unbiased writing style.  However I would need to refer to other sites to affirm whether or not an entire book of his ramblings would be worth my time.  At this point I turned to Worldcat to test the popularity and accessibility of each book and found:

Van Dijck's novel can be found at 559 libraries in 15 editions under the subjects of Social Media--History and Online Social Networks--History

Smolan and Erwitt's novel can be found at a lesser 262 libraries in 6 editions under the subjects of Big Data--Social Aspects and Data Mining--Social Aspects

Schmidt and Cohen's novel can be found at a whopping 1449 libraries in 16 editions under the subjects of Digital Electronics--Social/Political aspects--Forecasting and Digital media--Social aspects--Forecasting

This search led to the conclusion that Schmidt and Cohen's novel must certainly be the most popular in terms of demand and accessibility, therefore something essential must be held within the confines of its length, however I still wasn't sold on the topic of the novel itself.  It was then time to turn to the word of the ever-trustworthy average reviewer on Google Books to determine the quality of each text.  Google Books searches on all books led to the following results:

Van Dijck's novel generated no buzz or reviews.

Smolan and Erwitt's novel generated mostly positive buzz and a 4-star average out of 14 reviews.

Schmidt and Cohen's novel received semi-favorable reviews and a 3 and a half star average out of 2 reviews.

Only Smolan and Erwitt's novel came across as particularly popular.  LibraryThing was my final resource that came to break the tie:

Van Dicjk scored a 683,517 in popularity.

Smolan and Erwitt scored 443,774, relatively meager in comparison although it seemed to attract more buzz and reviews.

Schmidt and Cohen scored 96,356 but was read by 125 members and generated 7 reviews.

Given all of this information I decided upon Van Dijck's book for a number of reasons.  One being that its reviews were highly favorable and implied a sort of essential meaning behind Van Dijck's message, a meaning of which I am personally very interested in pursuing.  On top of that, the novel is fairly popular among scholars of whom herald the book for drawing a vital relationship between social media and social progression, suggesting a sense of urgency within its contents.  Beyond that, Schmidt and Cohen's novel seemed less and less interesting with each subsequent search and although Smolan and Erwitt's book seemed almost more appealing at most points, reviews, information, and popularity suggest it to be a mostly amateur effort in comparison to Van Dijck's book.  Furthermore, Proquest and Muse reviewed it in a positive light.  I look forward to reading more on Van Dijck's interpretation of social media's further integration into society.