I wanted to read this book because I thought Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs) would be the perfect person to channel McLuhan. Turns out he probably is, but that isn’t as entertaining or enlightening as I thought it would be.

Not that this is a bad book, it isn’t. Because Coupland is Coupland, this isn’t a straightforward biography. He imagines his way into McLuhan’s life and work, makes conjectures based on psychology, neuroscience, and a shared Canadian sense of space. He sprinkles zippy aphoristic McLuhan quotes throughout, such as:

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of profound despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions.

We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us.

It’s a service, really, pulling out these bits from McLuhan’s text, as apparently he is mostly unreadable. In other words, McLuhan’s writing is dense, obtuse, and seemingly unconcerned with clear narrative: it’s the sort of thing that academics and lawyers specialize in. In a footnote, Coupland concedes that “there exists little self-apprehended grasp of the man’s thinking” and compares reading him to visiting Antarctica, as you “have to have time, patience, endurance, means, and stubbornness to do so”.

This caused me to reflect on my time in graduate school theory seminars where discussion was frequently fueled by bullshit: it must be profound because I don’t really understand it, and I can’t admit I don’t understand it so I’ll insist on its profundity. My personal belief that you aren’t being revolutionary if only ten people sitting around a seminar table can understand you was not so popular in the English department. I probably would have been entertained at the first of McLuhan’s lectures, and hated the rest.

Wired lists McLuhan as a patron saint; his ground-breaking media theorizing is often — incorrectly — conflated with support of new technologies. He was intellectually ambitious, quite conservative, and it is possible that brain damage from strokes explains more about some of his later behavior and work than any textual analysis could.

If you think you should read McLuhan and haven’t, you are probably the intended audience for this book. If you’ve read him and wondered what the giant fuss is, perhaps this will provide context that gives meaning to the fuss. That McLuhan was creating a theory of media was new and different and important at one point, even if what he was doing wasn’t always obvious or understandable.

This book is wonderfully designed as an object and a story. I can image the confusion in a bookstore or library as to where to place it in the collection: science? biography? art? with the graphic novels (that hodgepodge section encompassing everything drawn from comic strips to Maus)? A solid argument could be made for all of the above. One of the things I appreciated about it is that it embraces the concept of book as physical artifact — parts of the non-dust-jacketed cover even glow in the dark — and makes you think about the value in that. It would be a lesser thing, a Kindle version.

The book reveals the stories of Marie and Pierre Curie and their work in discovering radioactive elements. If that doesn’t sound interesting, it is because you don’t know enough about it. I’ll confess, I didn’t before reading this book. But as the back cover puts it: sabotage! temptation! duels! mystery! revelation! In this case, those are all true stories. The book is about the scientific discovery of radioactivity, yes, and it is also about love, consequences, and the risks involved in the zealous pursuit of people and ideas.

The art (all created by Redniss) matches the story and is literally part of the text as she designed the type used as well. Most of the images are cyanotypes, which have a beautiful blue glow about them. The images aren’t collage, but reminiscent of them and that works well, particularly as Redniss weaves in other stories (the Manhattan project, Chernobyl maps, nuclear bomb testing). She even writes about Three Mile Island, and ties that back to Pierre’s death, seeing both as normal accidents — the kind of event marked not so much by one catastrophic mistake, but a series of interwoven events leading to disaster.

Redniss has created a fascinating object, a vehicle for an extraordinary story. I hope she creates more books, and that more creative people get their hands on this one, and that it helps them rethink the wonder you can design into old fashioned paper pages. Highly recommended.

This book is a low-key introduction to basic Buddhist concepts. It’s not a primer, but a personal story of coming to practice Buddhist principles in daily life. It’s low on theory, textual references, and explicit instruction instead providing a slice of daily life view.

There’s a lot about driving a cab around Austin, Texas as that is what Haycock’s daily life consists of, and it’s a job that goes well past 9 to 5. Having recently visited Austin prior to reading the book, recognizing some of the places added to my enjoyment of the book. I don’t have a driver’s license, but I imagine drivers will identify more with the problems he describes that could, in less skillful hands, consistently lead to road rage.

You get the impression that Haycock used to be not such a great guy, dabbling too much in things that weren’t so savory or good for him, but he doesn’t go into much detail. It felt a bit like he couldn’t decide how confessional (vs objective) he wanted to be.

Because this book is written by a lay person, its a different view of Buddhist practice than in usually presented in book form. It’s an at times interesting look at how someone else, a “real person” does it.

I received this book in the mail, apparently as a result of being on one of Seth Godin’s Linchpin lists.

The concept Gansky explains is in the book is important — she’s talking about seizing the opportunity to do things in new ways that improve on old ways of doing things because they are cheaper and/or more environmentally conscious and/or about generating revenue by adding value to the economy and communities, not extracting it. She offers example after example of socially connected, smart, being built from the ground up businesses.

If you want to learn about how entrepreneurs are taking advantage of pervasive web connectivity, social media, and mobile devices to grow businesses, you should read The Mesh. Gansky presents a compelling vision and believable evidence that it is not just a trend to watch out for in the future, but is something that works today. (Zipcar, anyone?)

Mesh businesses are … using what we’ve collectively learned about what works in a Web business for digital products and applying it to the sharing of physical products. This is the next phase. The mobile Web helps users locate a product to share, or people to share with. In most cases, a person actually has to get up from her chair to participate — it’s a physical experience, not just a virtual one. By linking the Web, mobile technology, and physical venues and products, the relevant offers can be locatted in a specific place and time. Just as someone uses the OpenTable app to make a last-minute restaurant reservtion on a mobile phone, he can make a date with a bike, tool, or car.

The last third of the book is filled with reference materials: a directory of Mesh businesses and references. Even though I am a dead-tree book person, I can see how these reference materials are much better suited to an online format. Seeing URLs in books, while good in the sense that they are providing links, is annoying in that they are tedious to read and type in. Fortunately Gansky has also put the directory on the web, where it can grow, instead of remaining static.

I’d recommend taking a look at the website, and then deciding if you need the dead tree version. One thing it did make me think of that a physical book, particularly a hardcover, is still often considered the most credible way to distribute important ideas — whether or not it is the best format.

With the time we (collectively) spend watching television, we could build more Wikipedias than the world needs.

Yes, really. We’ve got the time — even if we think we don’t, most of us actually do — and these days, nearly everyone has access to a sufficient level of technology to build stuff, not just consume stuff. Most importantly, we have have the ability to build networked stuff, to build networks, to leverage crowds to do something besides sit on the couch and watch tv. The free time of educated folks is a “general social asset” and if we (just in the U.S.) didn’t collectively spend it watching 200 billion hours of television, we could really do something. If we directed just a fraction of it differently, we could have another Wikipedia (a mere 100 million hours of effort) or come up with new, wonderful things.

Not that watching television has to be a solitary, disconnected pursuit anymore. Have you ever watched an episode of Glee with twitter streaming commentary? Shirky uses the example of lolcats as the “stupidest possible creative act” but that might actually go to the #gleek peeps on twitter. In any case, Shirky’s real point is in participating, by creating something instead of just passively consuming, there is the potential spark for great collective works.

We create one another’s opportunities, whether for passivity or for activity, and we have always done so. The difference today is that the internet is an opportunity machine, a way for small groups to create new opportunities, at lower cost and with less hassle than ever before, and to advertise those opportunities to the largest set of potential participants in history

I don’t think he’s wrong; he’s pointing out the possible, not necessarily the probable.

I highly recommended this book if you are looking for a richer, deeper take on user contribution; if you think we’re all going to hell in a handbasket and no one has time to do anything about it; or if you want to be provoked into thinking more about the possibilities for networked creating and building. (If you are pressed for time, you can check out the transcript of Shirky’s Gin, Television, and Social Surplus talk.)

Shirky raises more questions than he answers in this book. I think that is a good thing: we have to time to work on the answers, together.

The single greatest predictor of how much value we get out of our cognitive surplus is how much we allow and encourage one another to experiment, because the only group that can try everything is everybody.