This short review/interview may bear on discussions of Social Media and mediated social relations over all.
[excerpt from text follows; click headline for full blog entry]
Back in September, New York Times columnist David Brooks joined the post-publication fray about Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, arguing that it's "a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac." Little did we know then that Brooks was writing a fictional marriage story of his own. His new book, The Social Animal, has been getting even more varied responses than Franzen's, from "weirdly compelling" to "weirdly disorienting," I think in part because it's a strange hybrid of a book (that's where the "weirdly" comes in). On one hand, it's a pretty familiar Gladwell-style popularizing of the latest social science, but on the other it's, as I say below, one of the most experimental novels I've read in a while (though I don't think Brooks himself sees it that way).
>>Full blog entry, http://www.omnivoracious.com/2011/03/learning-how-to-be-a-social-animal-talking-with-david-brooks.html
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