Coming Soon to a Network Near You

June 1, 2006 8:20 AM

The Wealth of Networks: the seminar. We've talked about The Wealth of Networks before. Now Crooked Timber is hosting a web seminar on the book & the ideas in it. How it works: a bunch of smart guys read the book & write essays on it, then post them for anyone to read & comment on. You can read them all together (PDF) or separately with comments: Norms and Networks, A General Theory of Information Politics, Why Do Social Networks Work?, Whose Networks? Whose Wealth?, Mediating the Social Contradiction of the Digital Age, The Dialectic of Technology & the author's response. And now you can join in too!
posted by scalefree (7 comments total)

I hate when all the sites I visit all borry for each other, That being said, its a good FPP and Boing Boing is a good site.

Rant over...
posted by Elim at 8:34 AM on June 1, 2006

Ha, I didn't even see it there. I've been following the book & heard about the seminar several weeks ago, kept an eye on Crooked Timber for it. I think it's just one of those things that everybody's going to point out. It'll be on Slashdot & Huffington Post by tomorrow & Kuro5hin sometime next week (they're always behind but they get there eventually).
posted by scalefree at 8:46 AM on June 1, 2006

If you want to read the more academic side of this, I recommend MIT Prof. Eric Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation (creative commons license) and INSA, the International Network for Social Network Analysis.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:49 AM on June 1, 2006

Bunch of guys and dolls. There are a couple of female regular contributors to Crooked Timber, Eszter Hargittai and Belle Waring; Belle is arguably the coolest person ever born, I mean seriously leaps and bounds cooler than everyone else put together. Her husband John is, it should be noted, no slouch either.

CT's China Mieville seminar is excellent as well, and The Valve did a recent one on Theory's Empire that's good reading if you're interesting in metatalk about the state of literary theory and its (many, many) discontents. Also a recent mini-seminar elsewhere gave Gayatri Spivak the once-over on some work that, frankly, twice or thrice over might have better suited. These seminars make the whole blog shebang worthwhile.

Also: what the hell does Boing Boing have to do with anything? Other than being devoid almost entirely of substance I'm not sure why it's notable (and in the blogosphere that's not notable anyhow)...
posted by waxbanks at 8:51 AM on June 1, 2006

Is there an audio version (mp3)?
posted by blue_beetle at 9:15 AM on June 1, 2006

yeah, i, too, would love an audio version, as someone who does boring spreadsheet work for hours.
posted by eustatic at 9:40 AM on June 1, 2006

Waxbanks, It means I really need to sit down a either slim up or expand my bookmarks.

and you need to lighten up "francis"
posted by Elim at 10:48 AM on June 1, 2006