The story of the Stolen Sidekick was an effective way to start the book because the story epitomizes the effectiveness technology can have with our everyday lives. Usually when someone loses a phone in a cab, that’s the last they will ever see of it, unless you come across an abnormally generous cab driver or an extortionist. When Ivanna lost her phone, her friend Evan went to extraordinary lengths to make it into a story and generate a significant amount of awareness about it. After making a great deal of noise, including the coverage of over a dozen media outlets, Ivanna finally got her phone back.

 

While this story is more of the exception rather than the norm in everyday life, it just goes to show what the power of the internet combined with a collective group effort can produce. The efforts of Evan to make this known over the internet rather than in the “real world” ie posters etc. gave him a exponentially greater chance of recovering the phone because he was able to eventually reach so many more people with useful information of how to recover it.