Wise Animals explores the history of our relationship with technology, pointing out that we have been deeply involved with our creations from the first use of tools and the taming of fire, via the invention of reading and printing, to the development of the computer and the creation of the internet.
Human children know no more of modern technology than their ancestors did of older technologies thousands of years ago, and develop in relation to the technologies of their time. We co-evolve with technology as individuals as we have as a species over thousands of years.
The central message of Wise Animals is that we are neither masters nor victims of our technologies. They are part of who we are, and our future - and theirs - is in our hands.
Der Brite Azi Bello ist ein Hacker, einer der besten. Unerkannt bewegt er sich durch das Netz - und so ist der Schock umso größer, als eines Morgens jemand an die Tür seines mit Technik vollgestellten Gartenschuppens klopft. Es geht um Sigma, seine engste Hacker-Bekanntschaft. Hinter dem Pseudonym verbirgt sich die junge Muslima Munira, die dringend Hilfe braucht: Ihr Cousin ist zum IS nach Syrien gegangen, wo er furchtbarste Greuel erlebt hat. Nun will er nichts als zurück nach Europa. Im Gegenzug verspricht er explosive Informationen. Azi sagt zu und findet sich bald dort wieder, wo das weltweite Herz des unsichtbaren Netzkrieges schlägt: in Berlin. Doch damit hat die Reise erst begonnen. Am Ende steht Azi vor einem Gegner, dem alles recht ist, um eine neue Weltordnung zu errichten.
Over the last decade, through digital media, we have crossed a number of significant thresholds: the interconnection of over half of the world's adult population through mobile telephony and the internet and the devotion of more than half the waking hours of a western generation to mediated experience.
Yet little mainstream thought has been given to what these transitions signify for the business of daily living; and what thought there has been too often focuses on grand claims of loss or gain.
This book asks what it means not simply to live within a digital century, but to live well with it and within it. Unlike most other contemporary accounts, it is neither a tale of technology doom nor glory, but a pragmatic guide to what questions we need to ask of the world around us; what it might mean to answer these; and what practical steps might allow us all both to choose and to use the tools at our disposal, and to live within a digital century in as fully human a sense as possible.
