Why being offered 400 channels of TV, 39 mobile phone payments plans and 100 item on the menu of your local curry house doesn’t actually make you feel any better. I’ve always suspected that the cult of “increased choice” is part of a pernicious memeplex that is making us a lot more miserable than we realize. “Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” (Barry Schwartz)
But I keep trying… “The Bluffer’s Guide to Cricket” (Nick Yapp)
The ubiquitous blue underlined “links” that we are all familiar with are the lobotomized sprog of a once-rich typology of links that were experimented with back when “hypertext” meant more than “the web” ( See history of link types ) But even Randy Trigg’s link taxonomy looks simplistic when compared to the subtleties and complexities of the footnote… “The Footnote: A Curious History” (Anthony Grafton)
As you might imagine, a lot of discussion of politics, media, industry, etc. What I found most interesting was the discussion of the polar opposite trust models underlying academia and the internet. “Trust: ..From Socrates to Spin” (Kieron O’Hara)