Nonfiction
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America: History of comics that covers most of the bases, transitioning to an argument that comics receded both because of the rise of TV and videogames and because the rest of popular culture started catering to adolescents, or to the particular adolescent desires for sex and violence that comics often provided.
Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires: Tim once asked me whether he was more weird than I was; I told him that I was more weird, but that I passed better. This excellent book suggests that I might have been wrong. In clear, engaging prose, he offers the histories of a number of communications industries-telegraph, telephone, movies, radio, broadcast TV, cable, and then the internet-arguing that each reveals the influence of a cycle in which an entrenched industry is disrupted by a new technology. The disruption starts with poor quality but innovative products, in contrast to the old technology’s very nicely designed and profitable versions. The threat to the survival of the old models, and the messiness and uncertainty of the new ones, means that government can often be persuaded to intervene on behalf of the old, sometimes delaying them by decades. Wu argues that centralized control produces beautiful products and services, but suppresses free expression and experimentation. He argues that government should intervene, not on behalf of industries, but on behalf of separation-making sure that industries don’t get too big or too vertically integrated to crush the next innovation that comes along. This means net neutrality, but it also means potentially blocking the merger of cable companies with movie studios. There are counterarguments I wish he’d engaged more with-in particular, people often defend consolidation as the only way to save and cross-subsidize things like local newspapers-but it’s a really good read.
Jes Battis, Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction: Fun to read during my Farscape rewatch; basically, a big fan applies aspects of postcolonial and feminist/queer theory to talk about what’s going on in the show. I didn’t learn a lot, but I will always be happy to talk about how John Crichton’s heteronormative masculinity/standing in for “us” gets complicated by the fact that the other characters often think he’s inferior, that he’s regularly penetrated and violated, that he drips blood and pukes and hallucinates, that he never fully recovers from being tortured, and so on.
Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives: After-the-colon bit is slightly misleading, since there’s a chapter on electing presidents and less of the other stuff, but it’s still a good overview to the research on unconscious biases of various types, including racial, gender, and number (the suffering of one person or even one dog gets us to act, but make it two or more and we become less likely to respond). Vedantam uses behavior in the World Trade Center to show how people flock: if you see others leaving the building, you’re very likely to do so as well, and if others stay in place you probably will also. This means that survival, rather than being aided in this circumstance by the unconscious mind, actually depends on two things evolution hasn’t really helped with: (1) particular quirks of fate or circumstance that get a flock leader moving or not moving, and (2) whether flight is a good idea or not at that particular time-hint, in an evacuation, you might want to leave by an exit different than the one you entered at, because the main entrances are going to be more crowded. The chapter on presidential politics has the most on potential debiasing solutions, but I would have liked to read more.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires: Tim once asked me whether he was more weird than I was; I told him that I was more weird, but that I passed better. This excellent book suggests that I might have been wrong. In clear, engaging prose, he offers the histories of a number of communications industries-telegraph, telephone, movies, radio, broadcast TV, cable, and then the internet-arguing that each reveals the influence of a cycle in which an entrenched industry is disrupted by a new technology. The disruption starts with poor quality but innovative products, in contrast to the old technology’s very nicely designed and profitable versions. The threat to the survival of the old models, and the messiness and uncertainty of the new ones, means that government can often be persuaded to intervene on behalf of the old, sometimes delaying them by decades. Wu argues that centralized control produces beautiful products and services, but suppresses free expression and experimentation. He argues that government should intervene, not on behalf of industries, but on behalf of separation-making sure that industries don’t get too big or too vertically integrated to crush the next innovation that comes along. This means net neutrality, but it also means potentially blocking the merger of cable companies with movie studios. There are counterarguments I wish he’d engaged more with-in particular, people often defend consolidation as the only way to save and cross-subsidize things like local newspapers-but it’s a really good read.
Jes Battis, Investigating Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction: Fun to read during my Farscape rewatch; basically, a big fan applies aspects of postcolonial and feminist/queer theory to talk about what’s going on in the show. I didn’t learn a lot, but I will always be happy to talk about how John Crichton’s heteronormative masculinity/standing in for “us” gets complicated by the fact that the other characters often think he’s inferior, that he’s regularly penetrated and violated, that he drips blood and pukes and hallucinates, that he never fully recovers from being tortured, and so on.
Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives: After-the-colon bit is slightly misleading, since there’s a chapter on electing presidents and less of the other stuff, but it’s still a good overview to the research on unconscious biases of various types, including racial, gender, and number (the suffering of one person or even one dog gets us to act, but make it two or more and we become less likely to respond). Vedantam uses behavior in the World Trade Center to show how people flock: if you see others leaving the building, you’re very likely to do so as well, and if others stay in place you probably will also. This means that survival, rather than being aided in this circumstance by the unconscious mind, actually depends on two things evolution hasn’t really helped with: (1) particular quirks of fate or circumstance that get a flock leader moving or not moving, and (2) whether flight is a good idea or not at that particular time-hint, in an evacuation, you might want to leave by an exit different than the one you entered at, because the main entrances are going to be more crowded. The chapter on presidential politics has the most on potential debiasing solutions, but I would have liked to read more.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.