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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorEverything Bad is Good for You
Steven Johnson · 255 pages
Forget everything you've read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture. In this provocative, intelligent, and convincing endorsement of today's mass entertainment, national bestselling author Steven Johnson argues that the pop culture we soak in every day-from The Lord of the Rings to Grand Theft Auto to The Simpsons-has been growing more and more sophisticated and, far from rot
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
Tom Vanderbilt · 409 pages
A New York Times Notable BookOne of the Best Books of the YearThe Washington Post - The Cleveland Plain-Dealer - Rocky Mountain NewsIn this brilliant, lively, and eye-opening investigation, Tom Vanderbilt examines the perceptual limits and cognitive underpinnings that make us worse drivers than we think we are. He demonstrates why plans to protect pedestrians from cars often lead to more acciden
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Matthew B. Crawford · 320 pages
"A groundbreaking new book from the bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society
Farhad Manjoo · 257 pages
So You've Been Publicly Shamed
Jon Ronson · 313 pages
"From the internationally bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most overlooked forces. For the past three years, Jon Ronson has been immersing himself in the world of modern-day public shaming-meeting famous shamees, shamers, and bystanders who have been impacted. This is the perfect time for a modern-day Scarlet Letter-a radicall
The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom · 240 pages
Includes information on Alcoholics Anonymous, al Qaeda, Amazon, Animal Liberation Front, Apaches, eBay, General Motors, Goodwill Industries, Google, Grokster, Kazaa, music piracy, Napster, P2P (peer to peer) services, Quakers, record industry, U.S. Supreme Court, Wikipedia, etc.
Everything Is Obvious: How Common Sense Fails
Duncan J. Watts · 335 pages
Discusses how the concept of common sense is inadequate in an increasingly complex world and draws on multiple disciplines to offer insight into the sources of such topics as popularity, economics, and self-deception.
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
Henry Jenkins · 322 pages
Outstanding Academic Title Convergence Culture maps a new territory: where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways.Henry Jenkins, one of America's most respected media analysts, delves beneath the new media hype to uncover the important cultural transformations that
The Meme Machine
Susan Blackmore · 264 pages
After Richard Dawkins' *The Selfish Gene*, Susan Blackmore drive us deeply into the theory of the meme, social and cultural "replicators", trying to explain the human unique ability to imitate. Altruism, ideas, human behaviours, sex, poetry, music... seems to be simply the result of such as memetic selection... > Even our inner conscious self and our sense of free will are illlusion created by
Connected: How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do
Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler · 368 pages
Mobile Networked Creativity
Adriana de Souza e Silva and Mai Nou Xiong-Gum
The Human Condition
Hannah Arendt · 340 pages
A work of striking originality bursting with unexpected insights, The Human condition is in many respects more relevant now than when it first appeared in 1958. In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Arendt considers humankind from the perspective of the actions of which it is capable. The problems Arendt identified then--diminishing human agency and political freedom, the paradox th
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Sherry Turkle · 400 pages
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of Twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. In "Alone Together," MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced
The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)
Mark Bauerlein · 264 pages
This shocking, lively exposure of the intellectual vacuity of today's under thirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a nation of know-nothings.Can a nation continue to enjoy political and economic predominance if its citizens refuse to grow up?For decades, concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to y
Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg · 288 pages
From NYU Wagner: At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. Wit
The Disappearance of Childhood
Neil Postman · 177 pages
Argues that the intrusion of television into every home introduces children too early to adult concepts and activities and subverts their ability to think abstractly, and the very concept of childhood is being destroyed.
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Jonathan Crary · 144 pages
24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep explores some of the ruinous consequences of the expanding non-stop processes of twenty-first-century capitalism. The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life. Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-t
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman · 412 pages
Discusses the ways in which the mass media are manipulated to present the news according to an underlying elite consenus which affects the manner in which similar events in different parts of the world are presented.
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
Cathy O'Neil · 272 pages
A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life — and threaten to rip apart our social fabric We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should l
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Douglas Rushkoff · 296 pages
"An award-winning author explores how the world works in our age of "continuous now". Back in the 1970s, futurism was all the rage. But looking forward is becoming a thing of the past. According to Douglas Rushkoff, "presentism" is the new ethos of a society that's always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blend the past
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
James Gleick · 325 pages
"In Faster, James Gleick explores nothing less than the human condition at the turn of the millennium. He shines a light of enterprising and analytical reporting - as well as sly wit - on the newest paradoxes of time. His journey takes us through the bunkers and trenches of a war we barely knew we were fighting: to the atomic clocks of the Directorate of Time, to the waiting rooms that focus our
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
Gustave Le Bon · 208 pages
"Gustave LeBon's The Crowd is not only a classic, but one of the best-selling scientific books in social psychology and collective behavior ever written. Here, LeBon analyzes the nature of crowds and their role in political movements. He presents crowd behavior as a problem of science and power, a natural phenomenon with practical implications. Originally published in 1895, LeBon's book was the fi
The Formula: How Algorithms Solve all our Problems … and Create More
Luke Dormehl · 296 pages
In The Formula, Luke Dormehl takes readers inside the world of numbers, asking how we came to believe in the all-conquering power of algorithms; introducing the mathematicians, artificial intelligence experts and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are shaping this brave new world, and ultimately asking how we survive in an era where numbers can sometimes seem to create as many problems as they solve