Interesting Reads - Two Books and a Website

Since I'm reading books constantly, blogging about them all would become tedious, for all of us.  But some recent reads are worth mentioning.  Not sure how I found it, but I just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers.  Highly recommended & fascinating:


  Ideas about the social construction and deconstruction of privacy, and about the increasing corporate ownership of privacy, and about the effects such ownership may have on the nature of Western democracy. Dissemination of information is power.  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/eggers-circle-when-privacy-is-theft/


At the same time, I happened to be reading The Organized Mind by Daniel Leviton, which helped explain some of the multi-tasking, fast-paced work in The Circle and its effects on our brain.

In this impressively wide-ranging and thoughtful work, Mr. Levitin stresses the many ways in which evolution designed our minds to succeed in an environment that was utterly unlike the world of information overload we now face. And he aims to help us cope by providing concrete suggestions for solving the daily problems of modern existence.  http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-organized-mind-by-daniel-j-levitin-1408137852

And as a result of both books describing how the internet gathers information about us and targets us with what our apparent likes and dislikes are, I'm even more attracted to using StumbleUpon, a collection of the best pages on the Internet, according to what I, myself, choose to see.