The Influencing Machine, by Brooke Gladstone

[shannon_a]

I finished my first non-genre book of the year a couple of days ago. It was a Christmas present from Kimberly called The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media. It's one of a weird little medium of books that I quite like: non-fiction books illustrated as comic strips. Scott McCloud's trilogy of books about comics are perhaps the best example nowadays, and pretty close in style to The Influencing Machine, as Gladstone takes a similar fourth-wall-breaking style of talking. It's quite well done and I liked the art (two-toned artwork, colored blue and black by Josh Neufeld) enough that I immediately ordered a book from the library that the artist had done on his own about New Orleans after the flood.

The Influencing Machine takes an excellent look at the media and it makes me both angry and hopeful. It does this by pointing how messed up the media has been over the history of man. In other words, the weak-willed lapdogs that we saw in Washington during Bush's administration weren't an exception. So, on the one hand, suckage, but on the other hand, it doesn't mean the world is going to hell.

Gladstone goes into lots of other details on biases, balance, and other stuff, and it was all thought-provoking. I should probably read it a second time to lock down some of the stuff she said (though not immediately).

The book does spin off into speculation about the internet and future technology at the end, which I don't find in line with the rest of the book, but interesting nonetheless.

Overall, a compelling and good read.