Filed under: booklists
database aesthetics, victoria vesna (ed.)
he-said-she-said: talk as social organization among black children, marjorie goodwin
linguistic anthropology, alessandro duranti [this one is killer good!]
understanding practice: perspectives on activity and context, seth chaiklin and jean lave (eds.)
Filed under: booklists
while i’m scrambling up to finish up the last papers for the quarter my mind is already wandering off to other books…
The Everyday Life Reader, Ben Highmore (Ed.)
The Internet in Everyday Life, Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman (Eds.)
Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture, Stephen Duncombe
Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior, Don Case
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, Jorge Luis Borges
How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard
Filed under: booklists
Digital Freedom, N.D. Batra
Tyranny of the Moment, Thomas Eriksen
Genesis, Michel Serres
Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Michel Serres with Bruno Latour
Virtual Ethnography, Christine Hine
Filed under: booklists, disorder, information culture, information theory, noise
so here is yet another installment of my booklists. i have been mulling over issues of disorder and noise over the past summer, looking mainly to literature in information theory and postmodern theories which has helped to contextualize things for me, but i have been horribly dissatisfied with translating these issues into the digital information landscape.
cybernetic information theory feels inappropriate for so many reasons: a hyperlinear model of communication (sender-receiver), an emphasis on transmission to the detriment of meaning, and systems framework that is too teleological in its orientation. my emphasis on noise and disorder is predicated on an assumption that there is an aspect of networked digital practice is predicated on fun, play, chaos, sillyness…and unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a lot of good frameworks and theories that address this dimension.
i started thinking about problems of information overload to try and tap into a body of literature that would bring me closer to other dimensions of messiness and was initially disappointed as the term itself –information overload– has been used primarily by those in the information systems management literature that, again, conceive of information use and practice in relation to defined tasks and goals.
it seems that there is a growing body of work that looks at play and fun in digital culture, but what about boredom? as someone who is interested in digital practice and everyday life, how do we begin to conceptualize those quiet boring moments that make up the crux of our lives? what does being bored mean and look like now? is this different than previously? this line of questioning led me directly to Overload and Boredom by Orrin Klapp. I haven’t read it, but I’m damn excited to. I’m not quite sure what the relationships are between the disorder, noise, boredom, and banality, but there is something there….
Filed under: booklists
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music
Stuart Sim (Ed.) The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (I feel like such a cheat when I buy these edited volumes that have critiques, but seriously folks. When you’re reading dense po-mo theory on your own, you need to have a support squad to guide you through)
Geert Lovink, Zero Commones: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture
Filed under: booklists
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Michel Foucalt, The Archaeology of Knowledge
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social
::sigh:: this kind of feels very daunting right now…having no kind of structure and support as i try and plough through these books…oh so many books.
Filed under: booklists
so here is a series of bookslists that will be occupying my time and (mind)space during the summer:
information theory
1. Claude Shannon, Collected Papers
2. Klaus Krippendorff, Information Theory: Structural Models for Qualitative Data
3. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathemematical Theory of Communication
methods stuffs
1. Dennis Wrong, The Persistence of the Particular
2. Lazarsfeld, Pasanella, & Rosenberg, Continuities in the Language of Social Research
and…
po-mo!
1. Mark Poster, The Mode of Information
2. Scott Lash, Post Structructuralism and Post-Modernist Sociology
3. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post Modern Culture
4. Stanford Lyman, Postmodernism and a Sociology of the Absurd And Other Essays on the Nouvelle Vague in American Social Science [my, what a long title you have there]
5. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
6. Stjepan Mestrovic, Durkheim and Postmodern Culture
7. David Dickens and Andrea Fontana, Postmodernism and Social Inquiry
8. Steven Seidman, The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory
there will be more to add here soon….
the summer is looking up to be a really great. as i’m slowly finishing the last to-do’s for the quarter, there are several writinig projects i will be working on, one of which will be a literature review the combines the sociology of culture (or a post-modern sociology of culture) literature with the informtion structure and information organization literatures. if anyone has suggestions for these, that would be so absolutely lurvely! i probably will end up spending a good chunk of time trolling the UCLA library website and meandering through the dusty stacks, but any pointers would be a wonderful help.
Filed under: booklists
Bill Mitchell, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn
Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information
Donna Harraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
Filed under: booklists
The Practice of Everday Life, Michel de Certeau
The Sociology of Culture, Raymond Williams
De La Justification, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot
Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas
Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Philip Meggs and Alston Purvis
