The square and the tower : networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power
Material type: TextPublication details: India : Penguin Books, ©2017.Description: xxvii, 573 p. : ill. ; 24 cmISBN:- 9780241298985
- 302.309 23 FER-S
- HM741 .F424 2017
Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Books | IIITD General Stacks | History | 302.309 FER-S (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 008391 |
Browsing IIITD shelves, Shelving location: General Stacks, Collection: History Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)
001.9 EBU-O Outsider theory : | 302.309 FER-S The square and the tower : | 306.45 KUM-S Science and society in modern India | 809.9112 ARM-M Modernism : | 823.912 ANA-U Untouchable |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 439-536) and index.
"Most history is hierarchical: it's about popes, presidents, and prime ministers. But what if that's simply because hierarchies create the historical archives? What if we are missing equally powerful but less visible networks-leaving them to the conspiracy theorists, with their dreams of all-powerful Illuminati? The twenty-first century has been hailed as the Networked Age. But in The Square and the Tower Niall Ferguson argues that social networks are nothing new. From the printers and preachers who made the Reformation to the freemasons who led the American Revolution, it was the networkers who disrupted the old order of popes and kings. Far from being novel, our era is the Second Networked Age, with the personal computer in the role of the printing press. Those looking forward to a utopia of interconnected 'netizens' may therefore be disappointed. For networks are prone to clustering, contagions, and even outages. And the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries already have unnerving parallels today, in the time of Facebook, Islamic State and Trumpworld."--
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