my mind on books

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. [5/13 – link to the complete “webibliography”]

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.

The current issue of New Scientist has a feature on “life-changing books” by 17 prominent scientists, with the magazine writers and editors chiming in through short videos and some readers’ suggestions as well.

Some mind-related picks:

V.S. Ramachandran recommends Art of the Soluble by Peter Medawar, which is a little hard to find but is included in Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating The Art of the Soluble and Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought. (Check your library for either title.)

Oliver Sacks discusses The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory by A.R. Luria.

Frans de Waal nominates Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior by Robert J. Richards.

Ontology of Consciousness: Percipient Action (MIT Press) spent a long time as a “forthcoming” book but has finally made its own crucial ontological shift to “published.”

To me, the title doesn’t convey that the book is looking at consciousness from a wide range of disciplinary and cultural perspectives, which I think is needed to throw into perspective the assumptions made by one’s own culture and discipline.

Here is the product description:

The “hard problem” of today’s consciousness studies is subjective experience: understanding why some brain processing is accompanied by an experienced inner life. Recent scientific advances offer insights for understanding the physiological and chemical phenomenology of consciousness. But by leaving aside the internal experiential nature of consciousness in favor of mapping neural activity, such science leaves many questions unanswered. In Ontology of Consciousness, scholars from a range of disciplines–from neurophysiology to parapsychology, from mathematics to anthropology and indigenous non-Western modes of thought–go beyond these limits of current neuroscience research to explore insights offered by other intellectual approaches to consciousness.

These scholars focus their attention on such philosophical approaches to consciousness as Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, North American Indian insights, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization, and the Byzantine Empire. Some draw on artifacts and ethnographic data to make their point. Others translate cultural concepts of consciousness into modern scientific language using models and mathematical mappings. Many consider individual experiences of sentience and existence, as seen in African communalism, Hindi psychology, Zen Buddhism, Indian vibhuti phenomena, existentialism, philosophical realism, and modern psychiatry. Some reveal current views and conundrums in neurobiology to comprehend sentient intellection.

MIT Press’s site includes the Table of Contents plus full text of the Foreword by Robert Thurman, the Preface by Helmut Wautischer, and the Introduction by Stanley Krippner.

“Neuroaesthetics is wrong…” says Raymond Tallis in this Times Literary Supplement article (Apr 9, 2008).
Evolutionary and Neurocognitive Approaches to Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts is cited by Tallis as an example of “the kinds of things critics get up to these days.” (‘Search Inside’ the book available at Amazon so you can get a “free taste.”) Criticizing the reductionist approach of ‘neuroaesthetics’ Tallis states:

The neuromythologist, trying to find citizens and their worlds in neurones, stuffs all that has been created by the collective of brains back into a stand-alone brain; indeed into a small part of such a brain.

Tallis’s new book The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head (available in the UK but not until next September in the US) is discussed in this recent article in The Times.
Books by Raymond Tallis at Amazon.com

added a little later: another article about Tallis  in The Independent (April 11, 2008)