Team Berkman brings you snack-sized cerebral fodder to ease your afternoon doldrums.

Dave Eggers broods about social media

Dave Eggers, influential writer and mission-minded entrepreneur of the aughts, adds a new theme to the eclectic mix his books have covered. As a whole, his narratives and works have been deeply personal as well as socially relevant – they include a fictionalized story of a Sudanese refugee, a Syrian immigrant’s experience in the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina, and the stories of former prisoners who’d been sentenced to death and then exonerated. Now, the slice of social life that Eggers’ new book, The Circle, gazes into is our networked culture thoroughly mediated (and owned) by social media (companies). New Yorker Elements blogger Betsy Morais sees value in Eggers’ pessimism, but uses it as a basis on which to look more deeply into the likes of Facebook and Google as they are today rather than to contemplate the literary merits of the novel.

What’s cooler: Morais cites the published work of DPSI Pioneer Diana Tamir, a doctoral student in Psychology at Harvard on the Big Data team, which found that “humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex.” ¡Go Diana!

New minimalist blogging platform Ghost

After much anticipation, Ghost is here. Design and technology site The Industryoverviews the product, highlights its most attractive features, and tells you how you can get started with it. The skinny is that Ghost is all about one thing: writing. According to The Industry’s Gannon Burgett: “No extra bells or whistles, Ghost brings content center stage, making sure no unnecessary frills get in the way.”

(Image from: https://ghost.org/)

-Nathaniel, Team Berkman