Download or read book Cognitive Surplus written by Clay Shirky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us for the better. In his bestselling Here Comes Everybody, Internet guru Clay Shirky provided readers with a much-needed primer for the digital age. Now, with Cognitive Surplus, he reveals how new digital technology is unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For the first time, people are embracing new media that allow them to pool their efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind-expanding reference tools like Wikipedia to life-saving Web sites like Ushahidi.com, which allows Kenyans to report acts of violence in real time. Cognitive Surplus explores what's possible when people unite to use their intellect, energy, and time for the greater good.
Download or read book Here Comes Everybody written by Clay Shirky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses and uses examples of how digital networks transform the ability of humans to gather and cooperate with one another.
Download or read book The Shallows What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains written by Nicholas Carr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.
Download or read book Here Comes Everybody written by Clay Shirky and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the new future of involvement. Forming groups is easier than it�s ever been: unpaid volunteers can build an encyclopaedia together in their spare time, mistreated customers can join forces to get their revenge on airlines and high street banks, and one man with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen phone. The results of this new world of easy collaboration can be both good (young people defying an oppressive government with a guerrilla ice-cream eating protest) and bad (girls sharing advice for staying dangerously skinny) but it�s here and, as Clay Shirky shows, it�s affecting � well, everybody. For the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. And they�re going to change our whole world.
Download or read book The New Capitalist Manifesto written by Umair Haque and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this manifesto-style book, radical economist and strategist Umair Haque calls for the end of the corrupt business ideals that exemplify business as usual. His passionate vision for "Capitalism 2.0," or "constructive capitalism," is one in which old paradigms of wasteful growth, inefficient competition, and self-destructive ideals are left far behind at this reset moment. According the Haque, the economic crisis was not a market failure or even a financial crisis, but an institutional one. Haque details a holistic five-step plan for both reducing the negative and exploitive nature of the current system and ensuring positive social and economic growth for the future. Haque calls for a reexamination of ideals, and urges business away from competition and rivalries and toward a globally-conscious and constructive model--and a constructive future. Haque argues that companies must learn to orient their business models around: - renewal in order to maximize efficiency - equity in order to maximize productivity - meaning in order to maximize effectiveness - democracy in order to maximize agility - peace in order to maximize evolvability These new business ideals focus on the human element - not profit exclusively - and are easily tailored for any size or type of business, as long as they are willing to make bold and sustained changes to the current system.
Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.
Download or read book Divination and Human Nature written by Peter T. Struck and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divination and Human Nature casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, Divination and Human Nature illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.
Download or read book Digital Humanitarians written by Patrick Meier and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. This flash flood of information‘social media, satellite imagery and more is often referred to as Big Data. Making sense of this data deluge during disasters is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian
Download or read book The Attention Economy written by Claudio Celis Bueno and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-11-16 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attention economy is a notion that explains the growing value of human attention in societies characterised by post-industrial modes of production. In a world in which information and knowledge become central to the valorisation process of capital, human attention becomes a scarce and hence increasingly valuable commodity. To what degree is the attention economy a specific form of capitalist production? How does the attention economy differ from the industrial mode of production in which Marx developed his critique of capitalism? How can Marx’s theory be used today despite the historical differences that separate industrial from post-industrial capitalism? The Attention Economy argues that human attention is a new form of labour that can only be understood through a systematic reinterpretation of Marx. It argues that the attention economy belongs to a general shift in capitalism in which subjectivity itself becomes the territory of production and exploitation of value as well as the territory of the reproduction of capitalist power relations.
Download or read book The Democratic Surround written by Fred Turner and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-04 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “smart and fascinating” reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Reason Magazine). We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication—and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture. In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ‘50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. He tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the best-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe. Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today. “Brilliant . . . [an] excellent and thought-provoking book.” —Tropics of Meta
Download or read book Cognitive Surplus written by Clay Shirky and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy and time, a cognitive surplus. Shirky argues that this cognitive surplus, rather than being some strange new departure from normal behaviour, actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up to and through the early 20th century.
Download or read book The Diary of Samuel Pepys written by Samuel Pepys and published by . This book was released on 1665 with total page 1256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Little Rice written by Clay Shirky and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost unknown to the rest of the globe, Xiaomi has become the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer. Its high-end phones are tailored to Chinese and emerging markets, where it outsells even Samsung. Since the 1990s China has been climbing up the ladder of quality, from doing knockoffs to designing its own high-end goods. Xiaomi its name literally means "little rice" is landing squarely in this shift in China's economy. But the remarkable rise of Xiaomi from startup to colossus is more than a business story, because mobile phones are special. The common desiderata of the global population, mobile phones offer the kind of freedom and connectedness that autocratic countries are terrified of. China's fortune and future clearly lie with "opening up" to the global market, requiring it to allow local entrepreneurs to experiment. Clay Shirky, one of the most influential and original thinkers on how technological innovation affects social change around the world, now turns his attention to the most populous country of them all. The case of Xiaomi exemplifies the balancing act that China has to perfect to navigate between cheap copies and innovation, between the demands of local and global markets, and between freedom and control.
Download or read book Cognitive Capitalism written by Yann Moulier-Boutang and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;
Download or read book Present Shock written by Douglas Rushkoff and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, and compile knowledge. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed. Well, the future's arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this "now" is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Download or read book The Innovator s Hypothesis written by Michael Schrage and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Achieving faster, better, cheaper, and more creative innovation outcomes with the 5x5 framework: 5 people, 5 days, 5 experiments, $5,000, and 5 weeks What is the best way for a company to innovate? Advice recommending “innovation vacations” and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. The Innovator’s Hypothesis addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. Michael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively—and competitively—crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. He introduces the 5x5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. Successful 5x5s, Schrage shows, make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.
Download or read book Unthought written by N. Katherine Hayles and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In Unthought, she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking—how we use cognitive processes that are inaccessible to consciousness yet necessary for it to function. Marshalling fresh insights from neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive biology, and literature, Hayles expands our understanding of cognition and demonstrates that it involves more than consciousness alone. Cognition, as Hayles defines it, is applicable not only to nonconscious processes in humans but to all forms of life, including unicellular organisms and plants. Startlingly, she also shows that cognition operates in the sophisticated information-processing abilities of technical systems: when humans and cognitive technical systems interact, they form “cognitive assemblages”—as found in urban traffic control, drones, and the trading algorithms of finance capital, for instance—and these assemblages are transforming life on earth. The result is what Hayles calls a “planetary cognitive ecology,” which includes both human and technical actors and which poses urgent questions to humanists and social scientists alike. At a time when scientific and technological advances are bringing far-reaching aspects of cognition into the public eye, Unthought reflects deeply on our contemporary situation and moves us toward a more sustainable and flourishing environment for all beings.
