Category Archives: Main Page

Digital and democracy

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I’ve been dipping into [amazon_link id=”0691167346″ target=”_blank” ]Digital Keywords[/amazon_link] edited by Benjamin Peters. This is in the chapter ‘Democracy’ by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen: “Attempts to assess the effects of digital technology use on political participation have again and again found only modest effects and often a ‘reinforcement’ tendency whereby the digital technology use may correlate with political participation, but mostly in ways where already-engaged groups are even more engaged and less-engaged groups are no more engaged. Digital technologies offer easier access than anything else, but for many, apparently, access is less of a barrier to political participation than inclination (or confidence that even trying is worth one’s while).”

[amazon_image id=”0691167346″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)[/amazon_image]

The circumstances in which click-ability leads to a reduction in transactions costs or barriers, and those in which it doesn’t, is surely worth some research. But while the above argument is plausible, it does seem worth worrying about the way the filter bubble can reinforce social and political chasms. This by Tom Steinberg puts it eloquently.

Forthcoming books – more to read

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It’s catalogue season and the latest to arrive at Enlightenment Towers is the Fall catalogue for MIT Press. There are some intriguing-looking books ahead. [amazon_link id=”0262034794″ target=”_blank” ]Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment[/amazon_link] by Michael Smith and Rahul Telang will be one for anybody interested in viable business models in the entertainment industry – it promises big data techniques for finding out what viewers will pay for. Eric von Hippel’s [amazon_link id=”0262035219″ target=”_blank” ]Free Innovation[/amazon_link] is about how to enhance the social benefits of all the work done for free eg open source software.

[amazon_image id=”0262034794″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”0262035219″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Free Innovation[/amazon_image]

[amazon_link id=”0262035014″ target=”_blank” ]The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy[/amazon_link] by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz looks fascinating. I’ve always been intrigued by the social aspects of concepts of property (when I go to a restaurant I know I’m buying the food but not the plate) and clearly digital delivery of intangible versions of goods such as books and even physical delivery of tractors with software in them means these social norms are in flux.

[amazon_image id=”0262035014″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (The Information Society Series)[/amazon_image]

Among the non-econ/business titles, [amazon_link id=”0262529343″ target=”_blank” ]Information[/amazon_link] edited by Sarah Cook looks interesting – an “art-historical reassessment of information-based art in relation to data structure and exhibition curation.” I don’t understand that but the sound of an art-historical perspective on something tech and economics people talk about so much sounds promising.

[amazon_image id=”0262529343″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Information (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)[/amazon_image]

A century on

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The Great War still has the power to move us, 100 years on from the start of the Battle of the Somme. Listening to the coverage of the events and the memorial ceremonies (including this evocative report by Allan Little) sent me back to Paul Fussell’s outstanding 1975 book, [amazon_link id=”0199971951″ target=”_blank” ]The Great War and Modern Memory[/amazon_link]. The book is an exploration of that lasting emotional hold, traced through the wartime and post-war writing and culture which mythologized the conflict.

[amazon_image id=”0199971951″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great War and Modern Memory[/amazon_image]

This section on Marc Bloch’s description of the pervasive scepticism among the soldiers seemed particularly resonant, for obvious reasons, when the book fell open at these pages this morning. Fussell quotes Bloch: ” ‘The prevailing opinion in the trenches,’ he wrote, ‘was that anything might be true, except what was printed. … governments reduced the front-line soldier to the means of information and the mental state of olden times before journals, before news sheets, before books.’ The result was an approximation of the popular psychological atmosphere of the Middle Ages, where rumour was borne by itinerant ‘peddlars, jugglers, pilgrims, beggars’. ”

Unfortunately we seem to be again in a world of rumours and lies peddled by mountebank politicians. And yet, as Zola insisted in the context of a different crisis: “La vérité est en marche….”

Money Changes Everything

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I just started reading [amazon_link id=”0691143781″ target=”_blank” ]Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible[/amazon_link] by William Goetzmann. It will take a while as it’s too heavy to carry on trains, but I’m already loving it. This from the introduction:

“Markets taught people about such things as the limitations of the capacity for reason and the dangers of miscalculation. These complex conceptual frameworks augmented and stimulated the development of problem solving, but they also set up a conflict between traditional and quantitative modes of thought. This conflict is heightened during periods of financial innovation and financial disaster. Not only did financial architecture challenge traditional financial institutions, it also challenged traditional conceptual frameworks for dealing with the unknown. … Understanding and managing this conflict reman important challenges to modern society.”

I’m now deep in the opening chapter on Uruk, accountancy and cuneiform.

[amazon_image id=”0691143781″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible[/amazon_image]

China, not Europe

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Yesterday – the morning after the Brexit vote – it was too painful to think about what had happened. I’m horrified by the outcome. At least for my train journal I had a completely absorbing book to read. It’s Rob Schmitz’s [amazon_link id=”1444791052″ target=”_blank” ]Street of Eternal Happiness: Big city dreams along a Shanghai road[/amazon_link]. Schmitz is the China correspondent for Marketplace, a speaker of Mandarin and has spent many years living in the country.

[amazon_image id=”1444791052″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road[/amazon_image]

The book uses stories about different characters living on or near the street to illustrate some broader themes. The owner of a not-very-successful sandwich bar opens up the aspirations and culture of young people whose life experience has been so different from that of their parents, who suffered the Cultural Revolution, grew up with siblings, above all conformed. A flower seller has lived the rural-urban migration to work in a factory story, before setting up her small business and bringing her sons to Shanghai. An elderly couple scraping by on pension and a street food stall are victims of a fraudulent pyramid scheme.

The themes are familiar, but here are woven into the fabric of everyday life, and made human. I’ve only been to China once (Beijing) & would love to return, although am not at all sure I’d want to live there as Rob Schmitz has. It’s pretty clear now that America is in its post-imperial decline, the European dream is disintegrating, and the next century will be the Chinese one. Anyway, I really enjoyed reading [amazon_link id=”1444791052″ target=”_blank” ]Street of Eternal Happiness[/amazon_link] and if it could keep me from brooding over the UK’s historical (not in a good way) decision, that’s real testament to how interesting it is.