Central Skagit Library District

"We all have a vague sense that social media is bad for our minds, for our children, and for our democracies. But the truth is that its reach and impact run far deeper than we have understood. Building on years of international reporting, Max Fisher tells the gripping and galling inside story of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks preyed on psychological frailties to create the algorithms that drive everyday users to extreme...

Jonathan Taplin tells the story of how a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs began in the 1990s to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms -- Facebook, Amazon and Google -- that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries. Taplin offers a history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies,...

Documentarian Werner Herzog chronicles the virtual world from its origins to its outermost reaches, exploring the digital landscape with the same curiosity and imagination he previously trained on earthly destinations. Herzog leads viewers on a journey through a series of provocative conversations that reveal the ways in which the online world has transformed how virtually everything in the real world works - from business to education, space travel...

How has information and communications technology changed the world of commerce and industry? This wide-ranging film tells a remarkable story of our times. Impact on work: In the 1970s office work was done with typewriters and paper and correcting fluid. Computers were giant devices in air-conditioned rooms. Then in the 1980s computers got smaller and began to appear on people's desks. Whole industries and professions vanished. Simon Steele, a sub-editor...

As a society we seem to alternate between worship of and panic about the glittering world of the Internet, as a generation of children have grown up with a smart phone in hand, connected to the digital world 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Public discourse seems to revolve around ‘grooming’ and ‘privacy’, two issues that embody the fears and concerns of adults. What is less discussed is what it means to always be on, never alone, and bombarded...