Nonfiction
Michael Hunter Schwartz, Gerald F. Hess, & Sophie M. Sparrow, What the Best Law Teachers Do: Modeled on the earlier What the Best College Teachers Do. This book seemed to me to emphasize emotional investment in students more than that one, perhaps because law professors generally don’t have TAs and, while class sizes can be over 100, average class sizes are much smaller. Takeaways: the teachers identified as the best “(1) consciously structure their class sessions to achieve their learning goals, (2) show they care about students, (3) make classes relevant, and (4) are extremely effective with their chosen teaching methods.” While I took some lessons away, I’m not sure I got a sense of small, manageable steps I could take-I was much more impressed by recent research about how taking notes by hand is more conducive to learning than using laptops, which seems like a change I can implement with more success.
Itamar Simonson & Emanuel Rosen, Absolute Value: What Really Influences Consumers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information: The authors argue that marketers are losing power, albeit not across the board, when consumers have ready access to professional and nonprofessional reviews. Tidbits I thought were interesting: when we search for information, we tend to value that information more because we’ve searched for it-that makes it feel more relevant/worth basing a decision on than if it had been handed to us. In other words, “people infer from their own behavior that, if they looked or waited for that information, they must value it and should now take advantage of it,” which is a neat application of the concept that we tend to explain our own acts to ourselves as well-motivated. Also, the authors argue that big brands lose some of their comparative advantage in an information-saturated world: brands provide you with a good concept of what to expect from the next iteration, but if you have a good source of reviews, you can get the same predictability from an unfamiliar product/service. For the consumers with access to reviews and in categories that are well-reviewed, then, it will be harder for producers to control the framing of their products/services because reviews will help set expectations. This mitigates the ability of the seller to, for example, push you to a more expensive version by showing you the “cheap” one, the “middle” one, and the “expensive” one-in traditional framing, showing the “expensive” one leads more people to choose the “middle” one as a bargain/compromise, but the authors’ research suggests that access to Amazon-style reviews negates that effect.
I also liked the point that reviews are about finding good or bad fit-a bad review by someone who doesn’t share your tastes can actually make you more likely to want a product. In fact the authors found “that if you see someone disliking a product for reasons that do not apply to you (the reviewer criticizes the camera’s manual override capabilities, but you have no intention of using the manual override feature anyway and are content to keep it on auto), you will often evaluate the product more favorably than if you had not been exposed to that review.” This is a good indication that, as the authors concede, they aren’t claiming that internet-savvy consumers will be more rational in the usual sense of that term-instead review-users will behave differently than marketers have been taught to expect.
Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age: “Free” isn’t free; professional artists need money to live; surviving on advertising hurts creative content and leads to deceptive practices; private internet companies want too much of your data and pay too little in taxes. “[T]he psychology of creativity has become increasingly useful to the economy…. The ethos of the autonomous creator has been repurposed to serve as a seductive façade for a capricious system ….” Despite the promises of democratization that wouldn’t require organization (either within or without governments), this is still and increasingly a winner-take-all system: “The term ‘platform,’ which implies a smooth surface, misleads us, obscuring the ways technology companies shape our online lives, prioritizing and upraising certain purposes over others.” She also argues that “free” distribution doesn’t escape commodification, especially if you’re consuming cammed copies of a blockbuster-maybe abstaining from old media’s offerings entirely would be a better way of resisting The Man. The book’s arguments are largely bettered by Evgeny Morozov, though this is an accessible argument from the left. She is sympathetic to criticisms of copyright expansionism, but she argues that open access isn’t enough without a professional class of artists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Taylor doesn’t say much about “piracy” or about how the professional class should be supported, though at the end she suggests substantially increased state support for the arts, as they do in other countries. I couldn’t help thinking that most of the problems she discussed were really problems of inequality. Why should you have to write (even marginally successful) poetry to be entitled to a baseline income?
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Itamar Simonson & Emanuel Rosen, Absolute Value: What Really Influences Consumers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information: The authors argue that marketers are losing power, albeit not across the board, when consumers have ready access to professional and nonprofessional reviews. Tidbits I thought were interesting: when we search for information, we tend to value that information more because we’ve searched for it-that makes it feel more relevant/worth basing a decision on than if it had been handed to us. In other words, “people infer from their own behavior that, if they looked or waited for that information, they must value it and should now take advantage of it,” which is a neat application of the concept that we tend to explain our own acts to ourselves as well-motivated. Also, the authors argue that big brands lose some of their comparative advantage in an information-saturated world: brands provide you with a good concept of what to expect from the next iteration, but if you have a good source of reviews, you can get the same predictability from an unfamiliar product/service. For the consumers with access to reviews and in categories that are well-reviewed, then, it will be harder for producers to control the framing of their products/services because reviews will help set expectations. This mitigates the ability of the seller to, for example, push you to a more expensive version by showing you the “cheap” one, the “middle” one, and the “expensive” one-in traditional framing, showing the “expensive” one leads more people to choose the “middle” one as a bargain/compromise, but the authors’ research suggests that access to Amazon-style reviews negates that effect.
I also liked the point that reviews are about finding good or bad fit-a bad review by someone who doesn’t share your tastes can actually make you more likely to want a product. In fact the authors found “that if you see someone disliking a product for reasons that do not apply to you (the reviewer criticizes the camera’s manual override capabilities, but you have no intention of using the manual override feature anyway and are content to keep it on auto), you will often evaluate the product more favorably than if you had not been exposed to that review.” This is a good indication that, as the authors concede, they aren’t claiming that internet-savvy consumers will be more rational in the usual sense of that term-instead review-users will behave differently than marketers have been taught to expect.
Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age: “Free” isn’t free; professional artists need money to live; surviving on advertising hurts creative content and leads to deceptive practices; private internet companies want too much of your data and pay too little in taxes. “[T]he psychology of creativity has become increasingly useful to the economy…. The ethos of the autonomous creator has been repurposed to serve as a seductive façade for a capricious system ….” Despite the promises of democratization that wouldn’t require organization (either within or without governments), this is still and increasingly a winner-take-all system: “The term ‘platform,’ which implies a smooth surface, misleads us, obscuring the ways technology companies shape our online lives, prioritizing and upraising certain purposes over others.” She also argues that “free” distribution doesn’t escape commodification, especially if you’re consuming cammed copies of a blockbuster-maybe abstaining from old media’s offerings entirely would be a better way of resisting The Man. The book’s arguments are largely bettered by Evgeny Morozov, though this is an accessible argument from the left. She is sympathetic to criticisms of copyright expansionism, but she argues that open access isn’t enough without a professional class of artists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Taylor doesn’t say much about “piracy” or about how the professional class should be supported, though at the end she suggests substantially increased state support for the arts, as they do in other countries. I couldn’t help thinking that most of the problems she discussed were really problems of inequality. Why should you have to write (even marginally successful) poetry to be entitled to a baseline income?
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.