How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt was a very excellent read.  It explored the transformation of the music industry during the advent of the MP3 format of data compression.  The format of the book — one chapter on Brandenburg, Morris, or the adaptation of the MP3 — then one chapter on “Dell” and the changes to small town rural North Carolina thanks to increasingly efficient methods of media formatting, or the  transformation of the American music industry as this technology advanced.  I learned a whole lot about how the MP3 affected the blossoming piracy and informational freedom “scenez” on the early internet.  Anonymous usernames, dead links, double verification dummy server identification (I paraphrase because I am not familiar with the lingo, and admit these might not be 100% true, but it conveys the secrecy I feel) made up the “scenez” of internet piracy, and the advent of the MP3 encoding file revolutionized the freedom of this information exchange.

To me, this file introduction represents one of the largest cultural changes to American society, at least in terms of the internet.