book: women, fire, and dangerous things

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

I want to pull this book into the mix because classification and categorization is exactly what librarians do. How do these categories impact our understanding of knowledge and truth? Lakoff’s book is long and detailed, and he rails against objectivist perpectives. Yet, it’s facinating and useful for library and information thinkers to have this worldview as another tool in their kit. Early on in my MLIS program, I wrote a paper on postmodern criticisms of classification, so I probably won’t take that angle for this paper, but this would be a useful book if I come around to the topic again.

book: construction of social reality

Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Searle is an important member of the philosophical community, and this book is an interesting one. In this text, Searle confronts postmodernism arguing for a objective reality. He argues for realism at the end of the text. This is a book that I will need to read in detail if I choose to approach the project from a postmodern angle.

book: the postmodern condition

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.  Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature. Eds. Wlad Godzich and Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Vol. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
This classic is another book that I need to make time to read. I’m not sure it’ll directly relate to my project, but I plan on taking it on my vacation just-in-case. Lyotard argues that we are living in a postmodernist age. In this time, there is an “incredulity towards meta-narratives.” In postmodern though, these grand narratives are too broad to contain everyone, and lose the details. Postmodernists are aware of difference and diversity and realize that these cannot be contained in meta-narratives. What are the implications for online behavior? (Particularly given Turkle’s windows)