John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid: The Social Life of Information (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · botnet, business, economy, information, knowledge, management, technology
“Drawing from recent research and practical examples across a range of organizations, The Social Life of Information dispels many of the futurists’ sweeping predictions that information technology will obliterate the need for everything from travel to supermarkets to business organizations to social life itself. The authors examine the potential and limitations of technology with regard to intelligent software agents, the automated home office, business reorganization for innovation, knowledge management and work practices, the paperless society, and the digital university. Arguing eloquently for the important role human sociability plays in the world of bits, Brown and Duguid present an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals. They show how a better understanding of the contribution that communities, organizations, and institutions make to learning, knowledge, and judgment can lead to the richest possible use of technology in our work and everyday lives.”
Publisher Harvard Business Press, 2000
ISBN 0875847625, 9780875847627
256 pages
Andrew Barry: Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · citizenship, european union, governance, intellectual property, interactivity, neoliberalism, networks, politics, society, sociology of science, technology
Technology assumes a remarkable importance in contemporary political life. Today, politicians and intellectuals extol the virtues of networking, interactivity and feedback, and stress the importance of new media and biotechnologies for economic development and political innovation. Measures of intellectual productivity and property play an increasingly critical part in assessments of the competitiveness of firms, universities and nation-states. At the same time, contemporary radical politics has come to raise questions about the political preoccupation with technical progress, while also developing a certain degree of technical sophistication itself.
In a series of in-depth analyses of topics ranging from environmental protest to intellectual property law, and from interactive science centres to the European Union, this book interrogates the politics of the technological society. Critical of the form and intensity of the contemporary preoccupation with new technology, Political Machines opens up a space for thinking the relation between technical innovation and political inventiveness.
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001
ISBN 0485006340, 9780485006346
320 pages
PDF (no OCR)
Comment (1)António R. Damásio: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · brain, emotion, mind, neurobiology, neurons, phrenology, psychology, self
“Although I cannot tell for certain what sparked my interest in the neural underpinnings of reason, I do know when I became convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality could not be correct.” Thus begins a book that takes the reader on a journey of discovery, from the story of Phineas Gage, the famous nineteenth-century case of behavioral change that followed brain damage, to the contemporary recreation of Gage’s brain; and from the doubts of a young neurologist to a testable hypothesis concerning the emotions and their fundamental role in rational human behavior. Drawing on his experiences with neurological patients affected by brain damage (his laboratory is recognized worldwide as the foremost center for the study of such patients), Antonio Damasio shows how the absence of emotion and feeling can break down rationality. In the course of explaining how emotions and feelings contribute to reason and to adaptive social behavior, Damasio also offers a novel perspective on what emotions and feelings actually are: a direct sensing of our own body states, a link between the body and its survival-oriented regulations, on the one hand, and consciousness, on the other. Descartes’ Error leads us to conclude that human organisms are endowed from the very beginning with a spirited passion for making choices, which the social mind can use to build rational behavior.
Publisher Avon Books, a division of The Hearst Corporation, NY, 1994
ISBN 0380726475, 9780380726479
312 pages