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.

How Infants Know Minds by Vasudevi Reddy (Harvard University Press, 2008)

from the product description:

Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”—some basic ideas about other people’s minds—at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning.

But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is compelling evidence that babies in the first year of life can tease, pretend, feel self-conscious, and joke with people. Using observations from infants’ everyday interactions with their families, Vasudevi Reddy argues that such early emotional engagements show infants’ growing awareness of other people’s attention, expectations, and intentions.

The publisher’s website has more information, including a 13-page excerpt.

These are books on consciousness published in 2008, selected from WorldCat, which means they are in some library’s collection:
The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology (Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind) ed. by Thomas M. Lennon and Robert J. Stainton (Springer, 2008)

In his Second Paralogism of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant described what he called the “Achilles of all dialectical inferences in the pure doctrine of the soul.” This argument, which he took to be powerful yet fatally flawed, purports to establish the simplicity of the human mind, or soul, on the basis of the unity of consciousness. In Kants illustration, the unity had by our perception of a verse cannot be accounted for if the words of the verse are distributed among parts thought to compose the mind. The argument, or at least the unity of consciousness that underpins it, has a history extending from Plato to the present. Moreover, many philosophers have extended the argument, some of them using to argue such views as immortality.

It is the aim of this volume to treat the major figures who have advanced the argument, or who have held views importantly bearing on it. Original essays by scholars with expertise on the relevant authors treat Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, the medievals, Descartes, Locke, Cudworth, Bayle, Clarke, Spinoza, Leibniz. Hume, Mendelsohn, Kant, Lotze, James, as well as those working in contemporary cognitive science on what is called the binding problem of how the human brain can unify the elements of experience into a single representation.

Consciousness Transitions: Phylogenetic, Ontogenetic and Physiological Aspects ed. by Hans Liljenström and Peter Århem (Elsevier Science, 2008)

It was not long ago when the consciousness was not considered a problem for science. However, this has now changed and the problem of consciousness is considered the greatest challenge to science. In the last decade, a great number of books and articles have been published in the field, but very few have focused on the how consciousness evolves and develops, and what characterizes the transitions between different conscious states, in animals and humans. This book addresses these questions. Renowned researchers from different fields of science (including neurobiology, evolutionary biology, ethology, cognitive science, computational neuroscience and philosophy) contribute with their results and theories in this book, making it a unique collection of the state-of-the-art of this young field of consciousness studies.

Developmental Perspectives on Embodiment and Consciousness (Jean Piaget Symposia Series) ed. by Willis F. Overton, Ulrich Müller, and Judith L. Newman (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2008)

This latest volume in the Jean Piaget Society Symposia Series illustrates different ways in which the concept of embodiment can be used in developmental psychology and related disciplines. It explores the role of the body in the development of meaning, consciousness, and psychological functioning. The overall goal is to demonstrate how the concept of embodiment can deepen our understanding of developmental psychology by suggesting new possibilities of integrating biological, psychological, and socio-cultural approaches….

MindReal: How the Mind Creates its Own Virtual Reality by Robert Ornstein (Malor Books, 2008)

This is a book that shows, in simple detail, one of the most startling findings of modern science: We don’t experience the world as it is, but as virtual reality. And while much of the latest scientific work demonstrates this, as do many of the classical psychological illusions, it is an important meeting point for students of the mind, brain, philosophy and religion because, as we can now see in light of this book, all these disciplines begin at the same place.

This is not an abstruse treatise, but part graphic novel and part direct address. It allows the reader a breakthrough understanding of the mind which is not available anywhere else. It is, in part, a summa of Dr. Ornstein’s research and writing of the past 35 years (with pieces and references to many of his works) as well as a seminal introduction to new readers.

The Reflexive Nature of Consciousness (Advances in Consciousness Research) by Greg Janzen (John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2008)

Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre, but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers, this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive, and necessarily so, i.e., that they have a built-in, “implicit” awareness of their own occurrence, such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate, non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation, the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenomenal, or “what-it-is-like,” dimension of conscious experience, defending the innovative thesis that phenomenal character is constituted by the implicit self-awareness built into every conscious state. This account stands in marked contrast to most influential extant theories of phenomenal character, including qualia theories, according to which phenomenal character is a matter of having phenomenal sensations, and representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is constituted by representational content.

(If you haven’t already.) (Especially if they’re used i.e. recycled books.)

via boingboing

Plus
Amazon’s Essential Green Reading