Apple CEO Steve Jobs Going on Medical Leave from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

For the second time in the company’s history, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is going on medical leave. A year and a half ago, Jobs underwent a liver transplant, and recovered from pancreatic cancer in 2004. The company's most recent earnings report will also be released today. Both announcements come at a time when Apple is facing some of its toughest competition from smaller tech challengers as well as fellow titans like Google. Thus far Steve Jobs has been synonymous with Apple — an often essential part of the brand. What is the possible future of Apple without Steve Jobs? We talk about the legacy of Steve Jobs and the future of the world's most valued technology company with Ken Auletta, author of the Annals of Communications column for The New Yorker Magazine and author of “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.” We also talk with Steven Levy, journalist for Wired magazine. The podcast will be posted on this WNYC webpage, shortly.

Pair "Googled" with Programmed"

You’ve got to pair these two books together. You can read them in tandem; a chapter from Googled, followed by another from Programmed. Both flow well together, and aren’t entirely written in dissimilar ways; they complement each other very well. Each is driven by healthy skepticism. There are these ever more pervasive technologies in our life (say, web search on the one hand), and unlike “disruptive” technologies in the past (as Auletta’s said in his first few pages), you’re not really talking about something concrete here, say the advent of the commercial airliner, or a microwave. Instead, you’re dealing with abstract things, i.e. ideas, information, “knowledge” (Googled). When you couple that with what sociologists have known for years about media—that it intrinsically socializes us, “programs us,” Rushkoff would say—you’ve got a very dangerous mix; that is, potentially dangerous anyway. So it’s important to read both, and they’re not very difficult reads at all. They’re worth buying because, like other well written journalistic pieces, the narratives age well. In fact, Googled was published a couple of years ago, at this rate. And it’s only grow in its contextual relevance, as Google makes its ways onto TV and other spaces of traditional media (“encroaching” Auletta says).

Check this post out. See also: Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, The Highwaymen, World War 3.0 : Microsoft and Its Enemies