WHAT ABOUT: DIGITAL TECH

Tweens and teens have a lot of trouble envisioning the world without technology, so this is a fantastic overview to help them understand that phones weren't always the all powerful instruments that we can carry around in our pockets. Illustrated with engaging, comic style cartoons in pastel shades, young readers can start with the Manchester Mark 1 in 1949 and investigate a whole range of other technologies that have emerged, as well as ones that haven't been perfected yet.

There is a lot of information on a variety of topics. I loved the thumbnail sketches and brief information about people in the history of technology, spanning history from Al-Khwarizmi (780-850) to Joy Buolamwini, a "poet of code" born in 1989. There's a brief description of the development of the internet, and an intriguing discussion of what would happen if most of the computers stopped working, with an inset about the "Y2K" bug fear at the end of 1999!

Hackers, computer languages, spy cams, "the cloud", Google, fake news, emojis, 3-D printing, and pay walls are all discussed. This is worth buying for the thoughts about what the world will look like in ten years! I find that sort of prediction fascinating, especially since when I was in middle school, video phone calls were viewed as the farthest flung possibility of technology... but no one ever mentioned having a computer small enough to carry with us all the time.