I just finished reading Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen. The overall theme of the book revolves around Autistic thinking and framing effects. The author posits that autistic thinking has benefits that we all can learn from. The discussion of framing effects is less coherently spread throughout the book but suggests that people can decide what is important and improve their lives by choosing how to look at the world.
While I found the Autistic meme to be stretched, there are many valuable insights into Internet communications, economics and psychology. There is also a strong defence of modern bite sized culture which is really worth thinking about if you pine for the glory days of traditional culture.
Haven’t read the book so YMMV.
One thing I might posit, though I’d probably need a whole book to prove it, is that technologies like texting, instant messenging and facebook-like sites, while fantastic ways of delivering incremental bits of information, do little to actually bring people closer together.
Texting, for example, is a fantastic way to communicate to someone without actually speaking to them. It is inherently a very limited and mostly non-interactive method of communication. Now, maybe you have a reason for not just calling them, but a lot of those reasons are sort of negative, eg. don’t want to chat right now, don’t have the time, person talks forever, I just want to tell them this one thing, etc… A lot of the reasons for narrowing personal communications bandwidth have nothing to do with increasing the quality of a relationship.