It’s been way too long since my last pretentious philosophical post. I’ve got about three half-written, but none of them have really come together yet. But tonight, I’m posting something, dammit! I actually want to revisit my completely uninformed picture of what goes on in our brain. Long-time readers may remember my series of cognitive […]
Category: thoughts
The same people
Adrian was in town, so he called an impromptu Power Dinner of the New York TEPs. Mim and Qwidjibo and I showed up, as did a couple of Adrian’s other friends. First of all, it was at Hallo Berlin, which may have just moved to the top of my favorite restaurants in Manhattan. Awesome German […]
Tracing social connections
So far, my thoughts on applications for the ideas from Reassembling the Social have included management, marketing, and entrepreneurship. One more post on this subject, and then I think I’ll be ready on to move on to a new topic. The last topic is that of explicitly social connections, of friends. Friendship is a tricky […]
Leading a dynamic life
At the end of my last post, I wondered why people tend to believe that institutions are just there. Beemer’s answer was that “Maybe because for the first 18 years of our lives, they are? Childhood is dominated by relationships that are dictated and maintained by external systems, mostly “family†and “schoolâ€.” This makes a […]
Collective Marketing
As is becoming usual (yay!), check out the comments on my last post for some interesting followup. So the last post could have been titled “Managing the Collective”, and talked about how to connect Latour’s wacky ideas about actor-network theory with the world of corporate management. Today I want to spend some time connecting those […]
Creating the Collective
First of all, check out the comments on yesterday’s post, where Beemer refines what I’m talking about and comes up with a great example to illustrate it. Today’s topic: what the heck does any of this French wacky social theory have to do with anything real? I’ll lead off with a couple Latour quotes: “an […]
Reassembling the Social, by Bruno Latour
Amazon link I finally finished the Latour, about a month after starting it, which is about how long it took me to read his previous book, The Politics of Nature. It’s a hard book to review; the goal of the book is to explain actor-network theory, which Latour co-created based on the social studies of […]
The Art of Conversation
A few months ago, Wes made a comment about my post about good conversations where he linked the idea of flow with what I was looking for in conversation. I’ve been meaning to follow up on that comment for a long time, and tonight’s the night. Conversation is a topic near and dear to my […]
Latour-ian Networking
As mentioned previously, I am currently reading Reassembling the Social, by Bruno Latour. I’m most of the way through now, and hope to finish it off this weekend. The thing that strikes me yet again about reading his work is that it is so elegantly laid out that he draws me in to a completely […]
Secondary research
A little while ago, I joined a mailing list for user experience folks who were interested in understanding how various anthropological and sociological theory might impact their work. I haven’t had as much time to devote to it as I would have liked; in particular, I didn’t have time to do the first assignment, which […]
