In the lead up to Christmas we’re asking readers, contributors and people we’re fans of here at Nextness to tell us their favourite book of the year. Whether it inspires your own holiday reading list or helps you buy for that hard-to-please brainiac, please enjoy Wishlisting: books we loved in 2012. First up: Alex Campbell, Farrah Bostic and Nathan Jurgenson.
1. Alex Campbell | Boomerang: Travels in the new Third World by Michael Lewis.
In his collection of “financial disaster tourism” essays Boomerang, Michael Lewis explores what really went wrong in the wayward economies of places like Greece, Ireland, Iceland, and California. Along the way he discovers that each of their economic troubles are born of much deeper quirks (and perhaps flaws) in their national characters. It’s funny, insightful and probably the sharpest characterisation yet of how dysfunctional modern Western societies have become.
This quote from the book sums it up best:
The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007 has just now created a new opportunity for travel: financial-disaster tourism. The credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.
Alex Campbell works in corporate development at STW Group | @alexjcampbell.
2. Farrah Bostic | Distrust that Particular Flavor by William Gibson; Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff; How Brands Grow by Byron Sharpe et al.
There were two that were almost companion pieces, now that I think of them together, that I found very inspiring and compelling and made it even more important to me to engage more with both the creative and the practical sides of technology. The creative side was Distrust that Particular Flavor by William Gibson. It’s a collection of essays over the many years that William Gibson has been writing about nearish future tech, his reflections on his own context for tech, his own experience with it, his own observations of tech’s imprint on culture, and culture’s imprint on tech. And I can’t help but love his writing, it feels on the edge of … something. And it makes me want to write, and to imagine, and to play. With tech.
The pragmatic side is Doug Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed, which I think I read at the very beginning of the year. It lit a fire under my ass to actually get on with learning (and in some instances re-learning) to code. I grew up with my nose inside the guts of whatever home-built PC we had at the time; I understood hardware, and I knew how computers worked. I went to a University that was a “Bridge to the 21st Century” grant recipient, so I was a Usenet and Gopher user before I was a Mozilla and Netscape user; I’ve had email since Prodigy and Compuserve; I trolled my ex’s AOL IM history for chats with other girls. But I’d stopped thinking about how the Internet is made, and how it works, and how what we mostly see is not the Internet, but the web, and only if we’re not another layer out from the Internet, solely using Facebook-as-Internet. So I reeducated myself on how the internet works (it’s a series of tubes…) and how important it is to keep the true internet up, open and free.
There’s a third book I read on holiday that blew my mind professionally, called How Brands Grow by Byron Sharpe et al., and it’s the sort of thing that states the obvious no one in marketing is prepared to state. It debunks loyalty, differentiation, segmentation and micro-targeting so completely that it makes me wonder what the point of all those brand trackers and segmentation studies and digital ad plans was… And I consult it regularly.
Farah Bostic is the founder of The Difference Engine and blogs at Pretty Little Head |
@farrahbostic.
3. Nathan Jurgenson | Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation by Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon.
While most tech books try to impress the reader with too many up-to-the-minute examples, seduced by wires and circuits, Liquid Surveillance brings rigorous theorizing of technology, power, knowledge, modernity, social movements, and, ultimately, social care and justice. By taking a broad approach, this book will be useful years from now even as these technologies change.
Nathan Jurgenson is a social media theorist, sociologist, and writer for Cyborgology, The Atlantic, and the New Inquiry. | @nathanjurgenson.