On the benefits of:

I was completely unplugged for the first time in months, and it felt really, really good…

(read the full article on thrillist.com)

and the complete pointlessness of it:

… the unplugging movement is the latest incarnation of an ageless effort to escape the everyday, to retreat from the hustle and bustle of life in search of its still core. Like Thoreau ignoring the locomotive that passed by his cabin at Walden Pond or the Anabaptists rejecting electricity, members of the unplugging movement scorn technology in the hope of finding the authenticity and the community that they think it obscures.

(read the full article on Newyorker.com)

Game Changer: The Topology of Creativity

Mathijs de Vaan and David Stark, Columbia University
Balazs Vedres, Central European University

This article examines the sociological factors that explain why some creative teams are able to produce game changers—cultural products that stand out as distinctive while also being critically recognized as outstanding. The authors build on work pointing to structural folding—the network property of a cohesive group whose membership overlaps with that of another cohesive group. They hypothesize that the effects of structural folding on game changing success are especially strong when overlapping groups are cognitively distant. Measuring social distance separately from cognitive distance and distinctiveness independently from critical acclaim, the authors test their hypothesis about structural folding and cognitive diversity by analyzing team reassembly for 12,422 video games and the career histories of 139,727 video game developers. When combined with cognitive distance, structural folding channels and mobilizes a productive tension of rules, roles, and codes that promotes successful innovation. In addition to serving as pipes and prisms, network ties are also the source of tools and tensions.

Latin America wants to rejoin the world. Will the world reciprocate?

Some countries in Latin America, especially those on the Pacific seaboard, like Mexico, Chile and Peru, never turned their backs on globalization. Others did. Boosted by record prices for their commodity exports, they turned inward and subjected their economies to state controls, repeating on a smaller scale the model that failed the region in the 1970s.

Read the full article here