Palfrey and Gassner, Born Digital

At the beginning, I have to say, I was not particularly impressed by this book. I had issues with the title and with the endless chatter about "Digital Natives", that is, young people. Luckily, things got better. The book is based upon solid research and good secondary literature.

Of particular interest to me were chapters 5 ("Creators"), 6 ("Pirates") and 8 ("Overload"). Chapter 12 ("Learners") should have been useful, but it does not include interesting data; it is mainly small talk, and we already have our share of this.

As for the the creation, the word is used here in broad sense, to say the least. It covers such "creative" tasks as posting messages to bulletin boards and so on. However, it is based upon an useful - I hope - report from OECD and it gives some useful data about writing practices. I will need to take the OECD report (and some section of this book, perhaps) into account for the first chapter of my book.

The Pirates chapter deals with copyright issues and it quotes a promising monograph by Ellickson, Order without Law. It is quoted also a short study by Goodenough and Decker ("Why Do Good People Steal Intellectual Property"), and this one also looks of great interest to me... If I could work again on my study on the intellectual property in Italian Renaissance.

The Overload chapter deals instead mainly with reading. Even in this case, the studies quoted look particularly interesting.

All in all, a quick pointer to some interesting works.