The company has made some changes in its structure, but remains fairly hierarchy- and job title-free.
Malcolm Gladwell
"He was surprised that Sachi and I are still on good terms after nearly a year."
Lee Siegel, criticizing The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (see also the first in the series): “Never mind that "Connector," instead of being some sophisticated social concept, is also another name for "networker," which is also another name for--in descending order--"operator," "hustler," "ass-kisser," or "weasel." In other words, Gladwell's beloved Connector is a primitive commercial type who drives the rest of us nuts.”
Charles Tilly says that we humans use conventions, codes, stories, and technical accounts to explain things.
Includes MP3 excerpts from his interview, which supplements the profile.
Pamela Paul: “While the temptation to correct errors - which often reverberate from blog to blog - can be strong, counterblogging can be counterproductive. Authors report sad tales of the flaming feedback loops that follow such confrontations.”
The article links to the most blogged-about books of 2005, and I'm linked on the page for Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd (which links to my 'just quote' of a review of the book). Most of the writers asked seem overly-sensitive about reactions they read in weblogs, but then again, aren't writers overly-sensitive to begin with? (And the same for bloggers?) Dowd seems the most sensible about following what bloggers say about her by deploying human filters—her assistant and her sister—to forward her the important reactions.
Dowd's book is not listed in the top-20 list, however, but two technical aspects of the list strike me as interesting: you do not need an account to view the list and also search engines are allowed to index the list, though not archive it in a cache. (But what, no links so that I can purchase any of the books, with the newspaper getting a cut?) It's unusual for The New York Times to allow search engines to index anything—but it's very smart, because users coming in through search engines are more likely to click on the ads which most bloggers and weblog readers probably have learned to ignore.
Here are the books on the list that I've read, with, if applicable, a link to my short review for each:
- 3. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell (my brief review)
- 5. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen (my brief review)
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- 12. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki (my selection as best book of 2004)
- 14. 1984 by George Orwell (my favourite book of all time)
Malcolm Gladwell: “Being “smart” involves facility in both kinds of thinking—the kind of fluid problem solving that matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from explicit learning. If Johnson’s book has a flaw, it is that he sometimes speaks of our culture being “smarter” when he’s really referring just to that fluid problem-solving facility. When it comes to the other kind of intelligence, it is not clear at all what kind of progress we are making, as anyone who has read, say, the Gettysburg Address alongside any Presidential speech from the past twenty years can attest. The real question is what the right balance of these two forms of intelligence might look like. “Everything Bad Is Good for You” doesn’t answer that question. But Johnson does something nearly as important, which is to remind us that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that explicit learning is the only kind of learning that matters.”
What's remarkable about Gladwell's article is how he criticizes Johnson's argument that books are isolating and linear, which he, Johnson, says encourages passivity. In the section that Gladwell quotes, Johnson comes across as quite serious, but Gladwell deflects by saying “He’s joking, of course, but only in part.” In the passage quoted by Gladwell, Johnson seems to have totally missed the other half of learning that comes from books, which people get through writing about the book or at least quietly reflecting about connections the reader can draw to other ideas.
Gladwell, in what is a positive review of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson, seems to approve of the notion of both IQ tests and a bell-shaped curve of intelligence. A counterpoint to that would be Doc Searls' excellent article on education for Linux Journal. The title says "Part 2", and you can read Part 1 as well, but the first part is not necessary for understanding the ideas in the second. (Both of Searls' articles deal with The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Friedman. I have several articles about the book, including an excerpt from the book, lined up in my reading queue.) Searls argues that we are all smart despite schooling, not because of it, almost totally rejecting all types of formal learning entirely, including university-level education. All that's fairly tangential to what Gladwell and Johnson are arguing, except that it has to do with education, informal or not, and I'm still on the side that says that smart people watch smart TV, but doesn't make you smarter.
I didn't think that Blink was that great a book, and it had more to do with physical perception, not digital perception, so I don't know how well the book can be applied to textual communication.
