Joining up the dots in a digital world If everyone in the world had facial hair, it might be useful to divide people into beard-strokers and moustache-twiddlers. The former being good for quasi-philosophical pontificating; the latter helpful for more practical stuff. Ben Hammersley clearly wants you to know that in spite of his big-thinking credentials, he is more of a moustache-twiddler. For the avoidance of doubt, his carefully-foliaged face graces almost the entire back cover of his new book. On the front cover, the majestic handlebar moustache is detached from his face altogether and embossed. In case you miss either of these, a silhouette of said moustache serves as an occasional take on a tilde symbol in the line-spaces between paragraphs. IN Business Books And you will need those line-breaks to pause for breath. 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then is a whistle-stop tour of the digital world and its implications for modern life. Billed as an accessible guide for novices and technophobes, the book's sheer scope means it also provides plenty of mind-fodder for the tech-literate. As Prime Minister David Cameron's ambassador to Tech City, a member of the European Commission's High Level Expert Group on Media Freedom and editor-at-large of the UK edition of Wired magazine, one might expect Hammersley to be a heady digital evangelist. But his enthusiasm for the web is refracted through a desire to explain and explore rather than espouse. By seeking to join the dots between different contemporary phenomena, his book becomes much more than the encyclopedia of digital trends that one might mistake it for by glancing at the 64 chapter headings. Instead, he likens each of the 64 ideas to "an ingredient, which added to another can make something delicious, or potentially very nasty." As a result, Hammersley's book is also more than just a snapshot for those made giddy by what writer Alvin Toffler labelled "future shock" - back in 1970. For example, a chapter about the seemingly non-internet world of shanzai, or counterfeit goods, in China illustrates how the values underpinning the infamous knock-off industry are "placing a fat finger on the fast-forward button of product evolution." Likewise, social network websites are viewed in the broader cultural context of a changing nature of acquaintances that stretches back to the phenomenon known as "six degrees of separation." In so doing, Hammersley explains why the "Facebook capital-f Friend is a different concept to the lower-case-f friend." Elsewhere, the notion of asymmetry and the tendency of some internet businesses to destroy entire industries, often inadvertently, is put in the context of modern asymmetric warfare. The book's breadth and pace means you can feel your mind expanding with each page. Indeed, just when you think you might have accidentally taken a hit of Ritalin or popped an anti-narcolepsy pill, Hammersley provides a chapter on academic doping - and it doesn't feel at all out of place. By joining all these disparate dots, Hammersley does not claim causal links, but instead tries to explain why, in today's world, "everything is a work in progress [and] we are increasingly comfortable with the provisional." In short, why the "now" and "then" in the book's title are increasingly the same thing. The technique works so well that one wishes he had joined more than 64 dots by, for example, further considering the interaction between technology and pop culture - surely a dynamic that drives so much of today's future-in-progress. But wanting more chapters is hardly a criticism. When it comes to exploring the digital, there is a fine line to tread between the pointlessly philosophical and the pointlessly practical and Hammersley's moustache handles help us to stay steady on it.