Summer reading

Life is not a bowl of cherries. It is, in fact, a bowl of BlackBerrys.

No matter how much we would all like to get away for the summer and spend it sailing on the East Coast, surfing on the West Coast or connecting the dots between the nation's baseball shrines, we remain forever tethered to the workplace. A lot of us even — secretly — like it that way.

Well, if you're that type of semi-workaholic, part-time vacationer, you might at least take an afternoon off to dig into a good book. And if you're the type who has business on the brain all summer long, there is no better tome than one that skews your sense of the business world and how culture trends influence and inform it.

Here then are two books that do that with varying degrees of humor, shrillness and creative thinking:

1. “The Torpometronomicon: Ten Years of AcmeVaporware Miscommunications,” by Gary Clemenceau. You have to love a book whose key phrases on Amazon include “purest vapor, profligate amounts, bionic technology, John Smallberries, John Yaya and Martha Stewart.”

   Clemenceau is a friend of Telephony from way back, having worked in the trenches for PR agencies and corporate communications departments for telecom network equipment vendors during the 1990s. In his spare time, and possibly even during working hours, he also breathed life into a purely imaginary (we think) corporation called AcmeVaporware, headed by Drs. John Smallberries and John Yaya (think of your two favorite James Bond villains and multiply their campy sleaze by 100).

   Clemenceau's occasional hyperbolic press releases with titles such as “ACMEVAPORWARE ANNOUNCES FENG SHUI TORPO-FLUXOMETER” and “ACMEVAPORWARE ROUTES ATTORNEYS MORE QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY THAN EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE IN THIS DIMENSION, PHEW,” reflect a high-tech industry in love with itself, and Clemenceau shows unflinching dedication to depicting high-tech corporate absurdity.

   “The Torpometronomicon” collects the missives, white papers, executive essays and Q&As of the era from roughly 1997-2001 and adds a few new ones. They have never been funnier, and that's saying something because the real world has only continued to grow more absurd.

2. “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen. Writing a self-described polemic against the vast blogger culture is, if anything, a sure way to keep those bloggers fed. But part of Keen's point is that blogging — and by implication, Web 2.0 — isn't keeping anyone fed, neither financially nor culturally.

   His larger point is that the online universe, where anyone can be both creator and critic, is actually killing our culture. “Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters” are engaging in pointless, circular discussions guided mostly by self-reference. This, Keen proposes, is drowning out truthful information with a glut of constantly changing misinformation and drowning out the voices of educated experts, who might otherwise guide us to what's true and beautiful in the world.

   Keen's book may be an invigorating tonic to anyone who doesn't get Web 2.0 — and particularly anyone in telecom who's worried about investing (both figuratively and literally) in the concept of user-generated content as a guiding influence for new networks and services. Keen might be qualified to judge the efficacy of Web 2.0. He was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur whose own efforts to start an online music venture failed. Sickened by the constant chattering about the Web as a great democratizer, he turned against the machine — most notably in a 2006 article in The Weekly Standard titled “The Great Seduction.”

   His book is as fun and saucy as a British tabloid. (If you've ever heard Keen speak, he sounds a bit like Robin Leach from “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”) It's also edifying, though Keen, in criticizing the shrillness of the blogging armies, can be pretty shrill himself, which somewhat undermines his message. Also, his implicit suggestion that we should all be guided by a handful of elite experts is no more tantalizing than listening to the monkeys he's telling us to avoid.

Dan O'Shea is Editor-in-Chief of Telephony. He can be reached at doshea@telephonyonline.com.