Book: Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

I went through the books Amazon had under the search “information society.” There were a lot of results but by limiting it to books from 2012 and on and going from low to high price point (to eliminate the text books) I was able to find 3 interesting books dealing with information societies. The first one I found was Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Study of Folklore and the Internet (Current Arguments in Folklore) by Trevor J. Blank. This book was in the least number of libraries and had almost no reviews on any website. My second option was Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs Gina Keating. This book was a quite a few libraries and had spurred more discussion according to Google books. From what I read it is a bit of a hard read for someone not common with reading business books. The last option was Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage. This is the book I am choosing. It is the most talked about of the books I looked at. It had the best, and most, reviews. It compares past social media’s to current ones and gives insight into the current technology. I have found quite a few academic articles reviewing this book. They all are very complimentary. I found it was reviewed by Sue Burynski Bullare in Journalism & Mass communication Quartely, and Howard Schnieder in The Humanist. Both are cited below.

Schneider, Howard. 2014. “Writing on the Wall: Social Media-the First 2,000 Years.” The Humanist 74 (1): 46–47.

Bullard, Sue Burzynski. 2014. “Book Review: Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years, by Tom Standage.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 91 (1): 182–83. doi:10.1177/1077699013519900.