Cluetrain manifesto-like books

October 23, 2005 8:48 AM

Cluetrain-Manifesto-like books ?

I'd like to read good books about digital life, future, knowledge management, social softwares, etc... I've almost finished "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and I'd like to find similar books. Thanks.

posted by vincentm to society & culture (5 answers total)

check out changethis.com

They have a lot of manifestos on many topics.
posted by merv at 8:52 AM on October 23, 2005

Manifesto, you say?
posted by poweredbybeard at 9:55 AM on October 23, 2005

All my books on digital culture are horribly obsolete (hey, maybe they're more like Cluetrain than I thought), so check the publication date before buying. In addition they're not about business, and they're a smidgen less starry-eyed than Cluetrain.

However, from most-useful to least-useful to you (IMO)

Internet Culture (0415916844) is a collection of fairly dense essays on virtual spaces, community, democrary, individualism, etc etc.

"A Rape In Cyberspace". A google search should track down this essay. Interesting stuff, very well known. It got turned into a book, too, I think.

In the Beginning... Was the Command Line (Neal Stephenson) is about... well, lots of stuff, but mostly it's about user interfaces and how people react to them. The Hacker Crackdown (Bruce Sterling) is about BBS culture in the run-up to Operation Sundevil in 1990. Both have been released by their authors as etexts, I think, so it won't cost you anything to check them out.

Silicon Snake Oil (Clifford Stoll) explains how we should all maybe turn off the PCs for a bit and go do something in the real world.

Computer Power and Human Reason (Joseph Weizenbaum) is a prescient book which touches on how programmers (the only people who were using them intensely when it was written) work with computers

Silicon Second Nature (0520207998) is an anthropologists's take on artificial life and the Santa Fe Institute

You could do worse track down where the MUD/MUSH/MOO guys hang out online. They're all heavily into culture, virtual spaces, community, etc etc, and they've been around long enough to have the utopianism knocked out of them (something that's happening to the social networking, orkut/linkedin crowd right now). Try the MUD-Dev mailing list.
posted by Leon at 1:26 PM on October 23, 2005

Don't miss Seth Godin (and his various blogs); follow Hugh McLeod of gapingvoid and his "Hugh Train"; Creating Customer Evangelists and its assocated blog; the Creating Passionate Users blog and the WickedlySmart line of books from O'Reilly; and authors like Howard Rheingold and Malcolm Gladwell touch on many related issues.
posted by dhartung at 6:58 PM on October 23, 2005

Though I've gone a bit sour on the ol' Cluetrain, all of co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy)'s other work is well worth checking out.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:41 PM on October 23, 2005