The square and the tower : networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power

The Resource The square and the tower : networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power

Label

The square and the tower : networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power

Title remainder

networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power

Statement of responsibility

Niall Ferguson

Language

eng

Summary

"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."--

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

TLC

Dewey number

302.309

Illustrations

illustrations
maps
plates

Index

index present

LC call number

HM741

LC item number

.F424 2017

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

dictionaries
bibliography

Context

Context of The square and the tower : networks, hierarchies and the struggle for global power

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Williamsburg Regional Library. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.

Context

Work of