Thursday, December 12, 2013

"The Social Animal" by David Brooks


    The exercise of information has been an enduring process since the dawn of humanity and early civilization. Through passing down the skill of fire making, human species learned to preserve heat and prevent diseases; by agreeing on a set of gestures and sounds, conversations were constituted and communities were gathered together. The fact that information is generated, exchanged and captured from time to time leads to the success of humans excelling at group communication and large-scale production. To understand how this happens, dedicated researchers have been working on every trace of relevant social phenomena. The Social Animal by David Brooks is one of those books that dives into the accumulation and flows of information and looks for its collective and individual significances within the society. In the book, Brooks discusses about how unconsciousness implicitly affects the handling of information and the subsequent social products. We, as individuals and group members of larger society, all behold the essential intuition behinds information processing. The transfer of solid knowledge and records is the natural way that ethics and philosophies get passed down across generations and industrialized society advances. Nonetheless, people also consciously direct the way information develops for social, economic and political advantages.

Resources:
To purchase this book: Amazon.com
To borrow this book at UW-Madison: UW-Madison Libraries