The Influencing Machine by Brooke GladstoneMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media is not your typical graphic text. It’s a sweeping look at the history of the media, as well as a forecast on how technology will influence human evolution.
Equal parts philosophy, cultural criticism, and polemic, Gladstone’s Machine shows her reader how news has been reported and how public policy has been shaped from an American perspective.
Compared to a text-based book, Machine sometimes seems to dispense its information in bits and pieces. Also, some parts of the book get very academic and abstract, which might prove difficult for student readers. But that shouldn't stop them from using the book as a launching point for investigating issues surrounding the media.
Still, the book’s ideas provide the reader with many chewy parts to digest, and the visuals often add a humorous kick to Gladstone’s arguments. I particularly liked the part where Gladstone imagines how humans will interact with nanotechnology and vice versa.
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