Type of bind: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 192
Printing Date: July 31, 2001
Publishing house: W. W. Norton
Sale Popularity Level: 892375
Studio: W. W. Norton
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Brief Book Summary:
The New York Times bestseller. With his knowing eye and wicked pen, Michael Lewis reveals how the Internet boom has encouraged changes in the way we live, work, and think. In the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions in the history of the world, the Internet has become a weapon in the hands of revolutionaries. Old priesthoods are crumbling. In the new order, the amateur is king: fourteen-year-olds manipulate the stock market and nineteen-year-olds take down the music industry. Unseen forces undermine all forms of collectivism, from the family to the mass market: one grey box has the power to end television as we know it, and another one may dictate significant changes in our practice of democracy. With a new afterword by the author.
Amazon.com's Best of 2001:
If you've ever had the sneaking (and perhaps depressing) suspicion that the Internet is radically changing the world as you know it, buck up. No wait, buckle up--it is. While some people celebrate this and others bemoan it, Michael Lewis has been busy investigating the reasons for this rapid change. Employing the sarcastic wit and keen recognition of social shifts that readers of Liar's Poker and The New New Thing will recognize, Lewis takes us on a quick spin through yesterday and speculates on what it might mean for tomorrow.
Central to Lewis's observations is the idea that the Internet hasn't really caused anything; rather it fills a type of social hole, the most obvious of which is a need to alter relations between 'insiders' and 'outsiders.' In Next, Lewis shows how the Internet is the ideal model for sociologists who believe that our 'selves are merely the masks we wear in response to the social situations in which we find ourselves.' It is the place where a New Jersey boy barely into his teens flouts the investment system, making big enough bucks to get the SEC breathing down his neck for stock market fraud. Where Markus, a bored adolescent stuck in a dusty desert town and too young to even drive, becomes the most-requested legal expert on Askme.com, doling out advice on everything from how to plead to murder charges to how much an Illinois resident can profit from illegal gains before being charged with fraud ($5,001 was the figure Markus supplied to this particular cost-benefit query). Where a left-leaning kid of 14 in a depressed town outside Manchester is too poor to take up a partial scholarship to a school for gifted children, but who spends all hours (all cheap call-time hours, at least) engaged in 'digital socialism,' trying to develop a successor to Gnutella, the notorious file-sharing program that had spawned the new field of peer-to-peer computing. Lewis burrows deeply into each of these stories and others, examining social phenomena that the Internet has contributed to: the redistribution of prestige and authority and the reversal of the social order; the erosive effect on the money culture (both in the democratization of capital and in the effect of gambling losing its 'status as a sin'); the decreased value we place on formal training (or as he puts it 'casual thought went well with casual dress'); and the increased need for knowledge exchange.
Lewis's observations are piercingly sharp. He can be very funny in portraying ordinary people's behavior, but remains thorough and insightful in his examination of the social consequences. He notes that Jonathan Lebed, the teenage online investor, had 'glimpsed the essential truth of the market--that even people who called themselves professionals were often incapable of independent thought and that most people, though obsessed with money, had little ability to make decisions about it.' While Lewis's commentary gets a little more dense and theoretical toward the end, Next is an entertaining, thought-provoking look at life in an Internet-driven world. --S. Ketchum
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
The very first section of the Michael Lewis book "Next" is an extremely interesting story about Jonathan Lebed, a kid who basically found a loophole in the SEC's rules about what is right and wrong when it comes to stock manipulation. You see, Jonathan found out that he could buy a stock cheap and then drive up it's price by posting all over internet forums, convincing others to buy it. Then, he would sell high and make a killing. The fascinating thing is that this is similar to what stock analysts and other experts in the industry do every day. They make projections and recommend stocks, which will have the same outcome: changing the stock price. And these supposed analysts actually have a financial incentive to do this!!
The subsequent kid, Marcus Arnold, has all kinds of knowledge on law, most of which he evidently gleaned from CourtTV. The lesson of Marcus is that you can become whoever you want on the internet (wearing a mask, the author terms it), and gain people's respect, even more so than the supposed experts.
The third teenager of this novel, Daniel Sheldon, didn't really do much on his own that was innovative, except he provides a transition story to other experts such as Justin Frankel (original creator of Winamp and Gnutella). There is another short blurb on this old woman being surveyed by some interactive TV hardware. These final stories are relevant, they're just not nearly as entertaining as the very first two kids.
The conclusion is actually pretty good: we have Danny Hillis creating the Millennium Clock, which was supposed to be this grandiose symbol about us looking to the future with hope. Yet, before the project can be completed, it winds up being a monument meant to keep him from being forgotten. Likewise, we have Bill Joy (chief scientist at Sun Microsystems) somehow writing a book about a supposed Armageddon substance called "Gray Goo," screaming that the sky is falling despite not being any kind of expert in the field. It's just kind of ironic, because they have become the washed-up "incumbent" technologists, and the future isn't in their hands anymore.
The general theme is that the internet has allowed children to become experts. And despite the book being chiefly about technology, Lewis doesn't lose the reader in computer terminology. Although, he does spend a bit too much time on the social ramifications of TiVo.
The very first two parts are fairly strong, as was the concluding pages. This book is simply about Lewis traveling around, interviewing lots of people, and then reiterating their story. Not spectacular, but still worth a read.
Rated by buyers 
-
This book was just written after the dot com hype and the stock market collapsed. It tells a few stories about a 15 year old boy who beats professionals in the stock market and earns a few hundred K. It is about the internet that has changed a big part of the economy. I still think it is strange -- no ridiculous -- that building websites has started a whole new economy. It is strange that people have a day job running their virtual business in second life. Next shows and tells you that the world has changed and that the internet might be the subsequent information revolution after the steam engine started the industrial revolution...
Rated by buyers -
The internet and it's ramifications. It enables one kid to make tons of money "manipulating" the stock market by his online comments, and another kid to provide legal advice even though he has no legal training. It disrupts the TV industry, etc...... Yeah, it's old news, but the stories are still entertainig.
Rated by buyers 
-
To my mind, this is the best of Michael Lewis's work. His style and observations show the humour and zing that have become his hallmark, and his writing is at top form. Next examines the changes wrought by the Internet from the perspective of several entrepreneurs who have exploited its potential, mainly in the form of vignettes. There is no beginning, middle or end, so if you're looking for a story with a plot line, this is likely not going to appeal to you. The lack of story line is, however, what I found compelling - the theme of the book is, "There's this 1800-pound bull out there that everyone is studying and avoiding, and here are a few folks who have ventured out and ridden the bull and had great rides." This is pretty much quintessential Michael Lewis - he finds an individual, or an event, or an industry that has fomented a paradigm shift (a deliberate choice of words here, since Moneyball dealt with the emergence of SABRmetrics, whose acolytes all seem to have read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions").
Rated by buyers 
-
Not a profound book. Lots of story-telling to make a few good points. A fast and fun read.
Find other books like this one:
