and Book Signing by Books, Inc (Mountain View, CA)Googleplex, Mountain View, 1600 Amphitheater Parkway, 12:00-1 pm
The Authors@Google program brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books. Through the program, we invite authors to our Mountain View headquarters as well as our New York, Santa Monica, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, and other offices, where Googlers are treated to readings of everything from serious literature and political analysis to pioneering science fiction and moving personal memoirs; past participants have ranged from novelist Salman Rushdie and economist Jeffrey Sachs to journalist Bob Woodward and U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. When possible, we share these remarkable conversations with the world outside the Googleplex through our YouTube channel.
For this talk, new media pioneer and visionary Howard Rheingold will be interviewing me as part of an open and inviting conversation. He will begin by asking how attention has changed and will pose my argument that, before the industrial era, people paid attention in a different way (the example of the farmer) and that we have been “schooled” for a certain form of focused, disciplined, timely, hierarchical, one-directional attention by the Industrial Age. The “scientific management of labor” pioneered by Frederick Winslow Taylor became, by the end of World War I, the “scientific management of learning.” Virtually all of the apparatus of learning today descends from that time and that movement in labor/learning history. Our world has changed, our idea of the brain has changed, and so has the way we pay attention, but our institutions have been slow to transform for this new world.
After Google, I then go to San Francisco to tape a segment with the wonderful Dr. Moira Gunn for San Francisco’s KQED and the Public Radio program “Tech Nation.”
And to end on a perfect note: The lovely, gracious Petra Dierkes-Thrun and Sebastian Thrun of Stanford have invited me to dinner. Sebastian is someone I’ve blogged about before–his open, free AI course enrolled over 100,000 registrants! I’ve not met them but I know it will be a marvelous evening.
Special thanks to all my marvelous hosts during this Silicon Valley portion of my Now You See It author tour!
Very exciting!