my mind on books

This is the fourth and final part of the “webibliography” for Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, covering Chapter 9 through the Epilogue.

links to part 1, part 2, part 3

Ch. 9: Fitting Our Tools to a Small World

p. 215 Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness (Princeton Studies in Complexity) by Duncan Watts (Princeton University Press, 1999, 2003)

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (W.W. Norton and Co., 2003)

p. 217 The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (pbk. ed. Back Bay Books, 2002)

p. 222 Howard Dean’s presidential campaign
“Is social software bad for the Dean campaign?”
“Exiting Deanspace”

p. 224 bonding and bridging social capital
Better Together: Restoring the American Community by Robert D. Putnam, Lewis Feldstein, Donald J. Cohen (Simon & Schuster, 2003, 2004)

p. 224 social networks and divisions in American class structure
“Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace” by danah boyd

p. 225-228 #joiito and #winprog
joi.ito.com
winprog.org

p. 229 “The Social Origins of Good Ideas” by Ronald S. Burt (58 p. pdf)

Ch. 10: Failure for Free

p. 233 Failure for Free
“In Defense of ‘Ready. Fire. Aim’” (Harvard Business Review, Feb. 2007, p. 52-54, part of the HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2007) [subscription required; full text available in EBSCO Business Source Premier database; check your local library]

p. 240 Open source software
The Success of Open Source by Steven Weber (Harvard University Press, 2004, 2005)

p. 242 “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” ; other writings by Eric Raymond

p. 244 Sourceforge - projects sorted by activity

p. 247 Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (Portfolio, 2006, expanded ed. 2008)

p. 250 Nick McGrath

“Linux security is a ‘myth,’ claims Microsoft” by Robert Jaques

p. 253 Groklaw mission statement

“Letter to the Editor: No IBM-Groklaw Connection”

p. 254 SARS - “Chinese Scientists Say SARS Efforts Stymied by Organizational Obstacles”

“SARS in China: China’s Missed Chance,” by Martin Enserink, Science 301.5631 (July 18, 2003): 294(3) [subscription required; full text available in Gale/InfoTrac OneFile - check your library]

Ch. 11: Promise, Tool, Bargain

p. 267 The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (Anchor, 2005, pbk ed.)

p. 276 equality matching
Structures of Social Life by Alan Page Fiske (Free Press, 1991, 1993)
“Human Sociality”

(p. 281 - “Sluggy Freelance” no link)

p. 281 Usenet - groups.google.com

p. 282 civic bicycle programs - ibike antitheft instructions

p. 287-288 sending nuts and flowers
Jericho Lives
NutsOnline Jericho page
“Flowers Used to Protest War”
“Say It with Flowers: Gandhigiri for US Green Cards”

p. 290 Digg Revolt
“Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0″ by Kevin Rose

Epilogue

p. 296 lump of labor fallacy
“The Accidental Theorist” by Paul Krugman

p. 300 Sicko audience
“Sicko Spurs Audiences into Action” by Josh Tyler

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others by Marco Iacoboni (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Amazon still has this listed as a pre-order, with a publication date of May 13, but I saw this book on the shelves at my local bookstore yesterday.

From the product description:

What accounts for the remarkable ability to get inside another person’s head—to know what they’re thinking and feeling? “Mind reading” is the very heart of what it means to be human, creating a bridge between self and others that is fundamental to the development of culture and society. But until recently, scientists didn’t understand what in the brain makes it possible. This has all changed in the last decade. Marco Iacoboni, a leading neuroscientist whose work has been covered in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal, explains the groundbreaking research into mirror neurons, the “smart cells” in our brain that allow us to understand others. From imitation to morality, from learning to addiction, from political affiliations to consumer choices, mirror neurons seem to have properties that are relevant to all these aspects of social cognition. As The New York Times reports: “The discovery is shaking up numerous scientific disciplines, shifting the understanding of culture, empathy, philosophy, language, imitation, autism and psychotherapy.” Mirroring People is the first book for the general reader on this revolutionary new science.

Midbrain Mutiny: The Picoeconomics and Neuroeconomics of Disordered Gambling: Economic Theory and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Don Ross, Carla Sharp, Rudy E. Vuchenich and David Spurrett (MIT Press, 2008)

from the product description:

The explanatory power of economic theory is tested by the phenomenon of irrational consumption, examples of which include such addictive behaviors as disordered and pathological gambling. Midbrain Mutiny examines different economic models of disordered gambling, using the frameworks of neuroeconomics (which analyzes decision making in the brain) and picoeconomics (which analyzes patterns of consumption behavior), and drawing on empirical evidence about behavior and the brain. The authors argue that pathological gambling is a true addiction and that addictive gambling is the basic form of addiction, revealing the core character of all addiction.

The book describes addiction in neuroeconomic terms as chronic disruption of the balance between the midbrain dopamine system and the prefrontal and frontal serotonergic system, and reviews recent evidence from trials testing the effectiveness of antiaddiction drugs. The authors argue that the best way to understand disordered and addictive gambling is with a hybrid picoeconomic-neuroeconomic model, and their demonstration of this framework’s applicability to gambling provides a concrete case study for the more abstract description of picoeconomic-neuroeconomic complementarity in Don Ross’s earlier book Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation (MIT Press, 2005).

MIT Press information, including sample chapters

More on “picoeconomics” (micro-micro-economics)

newspaper article: “UAB researchers find gambling addiction’s wild card” (Birmingham News, May 6, 2008)

Dr. Don Ross’s webpage at UAB

This is the third part in the series of links for Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, covering Chapters 5-8 with links to the books, articles and websites from the bibliography. (Here are links to parts 1 and 2). There should be one more part and then I’ll join all the pieces together into one page.

Here Comes Everybody at LibraryThing

Ch.5: Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production

p.111 wikis

Ward Cunningham’s original wiki

Wikimedia Foundation

“The Hive” by Marshall Poe, Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 2006

(p. 118 - no links)

p. 122 “Worse is Better”

Richard P. Gabriel’s essay “Lisp: Good News, Bad News”

(p. 123 - no links)

p. 124 power law distribution
Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (Perseus, 2002) (pbk ed, 2003)

p. 126 The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson (Hyperion, 2006)
Long Tail blog

p. 129 fame - “Communities, Audiences, and Scale” essay by Shirky

“Why Oprah will never talk to you. Ever.” Wired 12.8 (August 2004) p. 52-55 [reprinted here]

p. 133 The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 2006) (pbk ed. 2007)

p. 136 Wikipedia deletion and restoration

“History Flow” by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas

p. 138 Siegenthaler and essjay controversies

Wikipedia on John Siegenthaler entry controversy

Wikipedia on essjay controversy

“Wikipedia’s credentialism crisis” by Nicholas Carr

p. 140 Ise Shrine
The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age by Howard Mansfield (University Press of New England, 2000)

Ch. 6: Collective Action and Institutional Challenges

p.143 Boston Globe - “Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church”

p. 144 Voice of the Faithful

Keep The Faith, Change The Church: The Battle By Catholics For The Soul Of Their Church by James Muller and Charles Kenney (Rodale, 2004)

p. 150 Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests

p. 157 end-to-end communication

“End-to-End Arguments in System Design” (10 p. pdf) by Jerome Saltzer, David Reed, and David Clark
“Rise of the Stupid Network” by David Isenberg
“World of Ends” by Doc Searls and David Weinberger

p. 157 the phone company fought bitter legal battles

NPR timeline on Carterfone decision

Ch. 7: Faster and Faster

p. 161 Conspiracies are punished separately

U.S. v. Wei Min Shi at Project Posner

p. 162 information cascade

“The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig , East Germany, 1989-91″ by Susanne Lohmann, World Politics 47(1) Oct. 1994, pp. 42-101 [note: links to JSTOR, abstract; fulltext also available in Gale/Infotrac OneFile — check your library for access]

p. 164 Flash Mobs

“My Crowd” by Bill Wasik [subscription required at Harper’s; fulltext available in Gale/Infotrac OneFile —check your library]

Belarusian flash mobs [book has this link, which I found hard to navigate, but here are some pictures]

Nasha Niva protest

“Belarus: Ice-Cream Eating Flash-Mobbers Detained” by Veronica Khokhlov, Global Voices

p. 171 Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization by John Robb (Wiley, 2007); Robb’s Global Guerrillas blog

The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas P.M. Barnett (Putnam Adult, 2004); Barnett’s blog

p. 174 Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold (Basic Books, 2002, 2003)

p. 177 Kate Hanni
Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights blog and website

p. 180 HSBC/Facebook standoff
“Now It’s Facebook vs. HSBC”
“Facebook Campaign Forces HSBC U-turn”

Ch. 8: Solving Social Dilemmas

p. 190 The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition by Robert Axelrod (Basic Books, 1984, 2006)
The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration (Princeton University Press, 1997)

p. 192 Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam (Simon & Schuster, 2000, 2001)

p. 195 Meetup browse

p. 200 Club Nexus
“A social network caught in the Web” by Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar
Bernardo A. Huberman at Hewlett Packard

This was my garage sale find from last weekend. I thought a spare brain might come in handy, and it was a bargain at 25¢!

Soon I will put it in its vat to see how it grows….

A donkey doesn’t so much accept its cruel fate as bears it, lets it pass over them. They’re the most philosophical of all animals, much more philosophical about their fate than human beings. And it’s an instinctive philosophy, a stoic acceptance, a kind of beautiful strength, passive rather than aggressive, not an ugly violent power. Needless to say, their philosophy isn’t academic, isn’t read in books or taught in a privileged classroom: it’s everyday, a simple disposition that’s lived out and practised, in an open field. We might say, if we used philosophical-speak, that a donkey’s philosophy is ontological, that it’s all about Being, the philosophy of permanent reverie, of daydreaming in the open air.

That’s a snippet from a longish book excerpt included in The Times article on The Wisdom of Donkeys: Finding Tranquility in a Chaotic World by Andy Merrifield (Walker and Co., 2008).

See also “Donkeys and wisdom” at hermit’s thatch.

This is the second part of a series on Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations; I’m going through the bibliography and posting links to the cited books and webpages. This post covers Chapters 3 and 4. It’s turning out to be an interesting exercise, a nice collection of resources, and it might save someone else some typing! The post with the first two chapters is here. [Added 5/8-part 3 is now up.]

Ch. 3: Everyone Is a Media Outlet

p. 58 Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It by James Q. Wilson (Basic Books, 1991)

p. 60 mass amateurization

“Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing” by Clay Shirky

“The Pro-Am Revolution” by Charlie Leadbeater (misspelled “Leadbetter” in the book)

We-think: the book by Charles Leadbeater

p. 61 Trent Lott

“Parking Lott” article at Gnovis (links to the pdf)

“‘Big Media’ Meets the ‘Bloggers’” (26 p pdf)

Ed Sebesta’s blog and articles

p. 66 In Praise of Scribes

The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One) by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Columbia University Press, 1979, 1980)

The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Columbia University Press, 2005)

p. 75 Crowdsourcing

2006 Wired article by Jeff Howe

Crowdsourcing blog (includes excerpts from the upcoming book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, available for pre-order at Amazon)

Ch. 4: Publish, Then Filter

p. 84 social networking site

Social Networking Meta List (2005)

“Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace” by danah boyd

Danny O’Brien post

p. 94 Email is such a funny thing

“The strange allure (and false hope) of email bankruptcy” by Merlin Mann

p. 99 “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”

BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow (10/10/06)

p. 100 community of practice

Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity by Etienne Wenger (Cambridge University Press, 1998, 1999)

Etienne Wenger’s website: www.ewenger.com

Freakonomics is collecting questions for primatologist Frans de Waal —45 questions have already been posted as I’m writing this.

Books by de Waal include Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (Riverhead, 2005, 2006).

Google Video has a recent video of de Waal and Daniel Batson at the 2007 Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity conference hosted by the National Humanities Center.

[update - here are the answers posted on 5/7 at Freakonomics]

I recently read Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky and thought instead of a review it might be more useful to post the links from the bibliography (first two chapters in this part) plus a few links related to the book in general.

Here Comes Everybody Blog - with this transcript of Shirky’s speech on “cognitive surplus” at the Web 2.0 Expo
Videos
Clay Shirky’s Harvard talk linked at boingboing

Authors@Google: Clay Shirky video

bibliography & links p. 309-319

Ch. 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone

p. 1: Ivanna’s phone http://evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick

“stolen sidekick” google search

p.7 We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People by Dan Gillmor (O’Reilly Media, 2004)

Center for Citizen Media www.citmedia.org

p. 17: an architecture of participation

www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/architecture_of_participation.html

p.18 a plausible promise Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”

p. 22 Within the Context of No Context, George W.S. Trow (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997)

Ch. 2: Sharing Anchors Community

p. 25: Birthday Paradox at Wikipedia

p. 28 “More is Different” by Philip Anderson Science 177 (4047) Aug. 4, 1972, pp. 393-96.

p. 29 The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. (Addison Wesley, 1975)

p. 30 “The Nature of the Firm” by R.H. Coase, Economica, 4(16), Nov. 1937, p. 386-405

p. 31 Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances by J. Richard Hackman (Harvard Business School Press, 2002)

p. 31 The Mermaid Parade (at Flickr)

p. 33 tagging “Ontology is Overrated”

p. 40 The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 1977) (pbk new ed. 1993)

p. 47 cooperation
The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics by Eric D. Beinhocker (Harvard Business School Press, 2006)
Small Groups as Complex Systems: Formation, Coordination, Development, and Adaptation by Holly Arrow, Joseph E. McGrath, and Jennifer L. Berdahl (Sage, 2000)

Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation by Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Cooperation Commons

p. 51 “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin, Science 162 (3859) Dec. 13, 1968, pp. 682-83).

The Logic of Collective Action Public goods and the theory of groups by Mancur Olson (Harvard University Press, 1965) (rev. ed., 1971)

p. 54 ridiculously easy group-forming - Seb Paquet, “Making Group-Forming Ridiculously Easy”

David Reed, “That Sneaky Exponential” 

This month’s BAM Challenge is to read about beauty; the book I chose is Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal by Greg M. Smith (University of Texas Press, 2007). I had read about this book on Henry Jenkins’s blog and thought this month’s challenge gave me a good excuse to read the book.
This work is unusual for television criticism in focusing on a so-called “middlebrow” series (p. 6) that is not currently being shown (and not even available on DVD in the US) — rather than one of the current ‘hip’ shows — and also in concentrating on the formal aesthetic and narrative qualities of the series instead of on its broader social or cultural significance.

The book assumes some familiarity with the show, since character names are mentioned without any background information. A list of episode titles with original air dates is included but readers are referred to tv.com for more information. I had followed the series but didn’t remember some of the minor characters when their names were brought up in the course of the book. (”Raymond Millbury”? for example.) Sometimes looking up the actor and seeing a picture would help jog my memory.

In the introduction Smith discusses his reasons for writing about Ally McBeal and his approach to television criticism. (The full text of the introduction is available at the publisher’s website.)

The first chapter looks at the use of music in the show (where I learned the term “diegetic,” referring to music that seems to come from within the story world, as opposed to “nondiegetic” or background music that the characters aren’t supposed to hear). In chapter 2, Smith focuses on the innovative use of special effects to portray the characters’ subjective states.

The book then shifts to examining narrative and argument, first looking in chapter 3 at the network of supporting characters and how they function “as thematic variations on Ally herself” (p. 74). In chapter 4, the use of guest stars is analyzed, showing how “eccentricity” is employed as a stand-in for the more controversial concept of “difference.”

Chapter 5 is concerned with the overall argument of the series, which is focused on the subject of sexual harassment. The law firm of Cage and Fish specializes in sexual harassment cases, allowing the series to examine the role of the courts, while also looking at gender relations in the workplace and in the characters’ personal lives.

According to Smith (p. 191),

Ally argues that the law can be a blunt, unpredictable instrument when it is asked to alter mindsets. Attitudes such as tolerance and respect cannot be legislated, Ally McBeal asserts; they must be changed through the gradual process of debate.

The author discusses his use of the word ‘beauty’ in the afterword (p. 197):

The concept of beauty that emerges from this book is a fairly old-fashioned one: a cohesive system in which elegant, innovative formal technique serves to convey a unified, complex argument suitable for moral and ethical insight. … In arguing for the art and argument of a quite silly (and often annoying) television series, I want to reclaim our ability to talk openly, unashamedly, unironically, and rigorously about television as a beautiful object.

Beautiful TV is reminiscent of Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson, which argued for the increasing cognitive complexity of television. Shows that develop over many seasons can become quite epic in scope, sometimes adding up to more than a hundred hours of programming (111 episodes are listed for Ally McBeal), although the effect is somewhat diluted by the week’s gap between episodes. With the increasing availability of DVDs and on demand programming, and the efforts of critics such as Smith, perhaps television’s beauty will come to be more widely appreciated.