What we read this week (3 Feb)

A taste of this week’s reading: Quora tackles the facts and figures in Facebook’s IPO application, the New York Times mulls over the growing pains in cyborg life, and the state of the future.

Quotes of the week

Maybe our desire to digitize and archive every little thing is not proof of a fear of forgetting. It’s a manifestation of our urge to remember how to remember.

– Carina Chocano

What if you didn’t buy books so much as join them?

– Megan Garber

Articles of the week

  • Quora: What are the most notable aspects of Facebook’s S-1?
    The Quora community expounds on Facebook’s IPO, providing a nice mix of editorial and factual content. The answers are dotted with interesting tidbits from the company’s IPO registration statement (S-1). The word ‘control’, for instance, is mentioned 131 times in the document, compared to 35 mentions of ‘privacy’.
  • Dan Pink: The Flip Manifesto
    Dan Pink offers 16 pieces of business advice that “[flip] conventional wisdom.” His points include “for Godsakes, talk like a human being” and “take as much vacation as you want.” He introduces his thinking with a case study of one of our best-known contemporary entrepreneurs: Bob the Builder. If you’re not feeling quite up to reading the whole thing, watch Dan’s 10-minute animated talk on motivation at the RSA.
  • Parker Higgins: Twitter’s best-in-class censorship reveals weaknesses in centralized corporate communication channels
    Our friend Parker Higgins, who recently moved to San Francisco to work for the EFF, with an on-point assertion about the implications of Twitter’s censorship acknowledgment.
  • New York Times: The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg
    Carina Chocano discusses what we experience when we lose our data, or “the constantly generated, centrally stored evidence of our existence.” A perceptive take on the interplay between human life and technology.
  • Imperica: The future of the future
    Leila Johnston and Chris Heathcote discuss the future of… the future, and of advertising. As our notion of the future has become very blurry compared to the 50s, their grasp of the current state of futurism is a must-read. Along the way we learn that advertising can stay relevant, particularly if it fulfills a need beyond just advertising a product.

Author: Maddie

Maddie is a strategist and researcher. She spends much of her time on the think tank side of Third Wave, and enjoys getting into the details of many different topics at once. Through this foraging for information, she finds ways to apply knowledge from one field in new, seemingly disparate ones, both in client work and other research. She holds an interdisciplinary BA in Computer Science, Linguistics and German, and has previously worked at VCCP and at the Science Gallery in Dublin.