I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link. The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing [...]
Tagged as:
change,
evolution,
facebook,
future,
generativity,
meaning,
philosophy,
progress,
social media,
society,
technology,
twitter
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration. A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which [...]
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anthropology,
books,
clay shirky,
evolution,
fiction,
history,
literature,
nicholas carr,
non-fiction,
reading,
richard florida,
sociology
The core of my practice of theory is an appreciation of what I call “object bias” — our tendency to conceive experience composed of distinct and permanent objects.
Tagged as:
abstract objects,
abstraction,
cognitive science,
epistemology,
evolution,
heuristics,
object bias,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
specialization,
think21st
Reflecting on last weekend’s talk on creativity I worried that probably emphasized the “open” aspect of the creative cycle at the expense of the “closed” aspect. My gist seemed to be, “Don’t worry about anything… try everything, and fantastic creations will magically appear.” Given the circumstances, I’m happy I erred that way rather than the other. We [...]
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benjamin franklin,
bruce mau,
complexity,
creativity,
dennis dutton,
digital media,
discovery,
electricity,
epistemology,
evolution,
generativity,
history,
paradigms,
poetry,
pragmatism,
progress,
revolutions,
social media,
theory,
think21st,
thomas kuhn
Generativity is one of the core concepts I keep coming back to. I think it’s at least as important as “sustainability” and we shouldn’t think about one without thinking about the other. Recently I noticed Tim O’Reilly mention it with new (to me) associations in a TechCrunch post about Gov 2.0: The government may build [...]
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cultural evolution,
development,
evolution,
generativity,
innovation,
institutions,
intellectual evolution,
jonathan zittrain,
open government,
open innovation,
open source,
tim o'reilly,
twitter,
web
Mark Bauerlein complained at WSJ.com that “Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues.” It has something to do with all the time they spend, according to Nielson Mobile, sending and receiving an individual average of maybe 1,742 or 2,272 mobile text messages per month. And what’s supposed to be bad about that? Bauerlein’s concern is that “much of [...]
Tagged as:
asd,
asperger's syndrom,
autism,
cognitive styles,
communication,
create your own economy,
cultural evolution,
evolution,
generation y,
language,
mark bauerlein,
neurodiversity,
nonverbal communication,
psychology,
society,
the dumbest generation,
tyler cowen,
work
Another bit of a ramble (I love where it ends up), starting with this Time Q&A: TIME: How difficult was it to chart a history of a massive and diverse thing like blogging? Rosenberg: This is a phenomenon that starts small, then diversifies, then explodes at a certain point. At the small phase, it’s not that [...]
Tagged as:
blogging,
careers,
cultural evolution,
digital media,
evolution,
higher education,
history,
progress,
social media,
technology,
trends
by OpenConceptual on 07-15-2009
in concepts
Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.” That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate [...]
Tagged as:
competence,
cultural evolution,
evolution,
failure,
finance crisis,
generativity,
institutions,
love of learning,
new economics,
organizations,
physics,
pragmatism,
quantum theory,
randomness,
science,
success
There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter): “Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).” It’s a good following to the last post, about [...]
Tagged as:
cultural evolution,
evolution,
ideas,
intellectual evolution
by OpenConceptual on 06-23-2009
in examples
A recent paper published in Science argues that our big brains aren’t what ultimately caused early human cultural development. In fact, it took maybe 100,000 years (give or take tens of thousands) for the human brain to find its mojo. What was the secret? Sure enough, when the critical population density was reached or there [...]
Tagged as:
creativity,
density,
diversity,
evolution,
generativity,
interaction
by Brian on 05-16-2009
in media
Above all the claims about the need to save journalism, about it being essential to our society, etc, this fact seems to be missed: the more essential journalism is supposed to be, the more continuously prevalent it should appear throughout history. How much historical continuity is there? Where did journalism really come from? What is [...]
Tagged as:
cultural evolution,
evolution,
history,
journalism,
media,
practices,
professions,
twitter
I feel obligated to write about this because it squats squarely in my basket of interests, touching on politics, belief, science, ethics, media… If I didn’t post something about this I’d be signaling gross indifference to the enterprise of blogging. Concern in the science community shouldn’t be surprising. By comparison, while we don’t expect the agriculture [...]
Tagged as:
attraction,
belief,
canada,
chance,
darwin,
evolution,
politics,
religion,
science
Survival of the Fittest Ideas
by OpenConceptual on 07-07-2009
in commentary
There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter): “Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).” It’s a good following to the last post, about [...]
Tagged as: cultural evolution, evolution, ideas, intellectual evolution