Read Me! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, internet, labor, market economy, media art, media culture, media theory, net art, net culture, network culture, software, sound, technology
A compilation of writings and debates from the Nettime newsgroup and internet mailing list. This book documents the debates over emerging media technologies that are currently reshaping society. What are the liberatory potentials? Where are the points of political conflict and class struggle in this new culture? What are the pitfalls of new technology? Read Me! provides the beginnings of this discussion and an outline for what has become a continuing forum on the Net.
Edited by Josephine Bosma, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, Pit Schultz Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, and Faith Wilding
Publisher: Autonomedia (February, 1999)
ISBN: 1570270899, 978-1570270895
556 pages
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Comment (0)David Holmes (ed.): Virtual Globalization: Virtual Spaces/Tourist Spaces (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, globalisation, information technology, internet, technology, telematics, tourism, virtual communities
This book examines the interrelationship between the telecommunications and tourism in shaping the nature of space, place and the urban at the end of the twentieth century. They discuss how these agents are instrumental inthe production of homogenous world-spaces, and how these in turn presuppose new kinds of political and cultural identity. This work will be of essential interest to scholars and students in the fields of sociology, geography, cultural studies and media studies.
Publisher Routledge, 2001
Volume 1 of Routledge advances in sociology
ISBN 0415236738, 9780415236737
Length 269 pages
David Holmes: Communication Theory. Media, Technology and Society (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · communication, community, cyberspace, internet, mass media, technology, theory of communication, virtual communities
This book offers an introduction to communication theory that is appropriate to our post-broadcast, interactive media environment. The author contrasts the ‘first media age’ of broadcast with the ’second media age’ of interactivity.
Communication Theory argues that the different kinds of communication dynamics found in cyberspace demand a reassessment of the methodologies used to explore media, as well as new understandings of the concepts of interaction and community (virtual communities and broadcast communities).
The media are examined not simply in terms of content, but also in terms of medium and network forms. Holmes also explores the differences between analogue and digital cultures, and between cyberspace and virtual reality.
The book serves both as an upper level textbook for New Media courses and a good general guide to understanding the sociological complexities of the modern communications environment.
Publisher SAGE, 2005
ISBN 0761970703, 9780761970705
Length 255 pages
Verena Andermatt Conley (ed.): Rethinking Technologies (1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, autopoiesis, cyberspace, cyborgs, philosophy, philosophy of technology, postmodern, science, technology, virtual reality
Grounded on the assumption that the relationship between the arts and the sciences is dictated by technology, the essays in Rethinking Technologies explore trends in contemporary thought that have been changing our awareness of science, technology, and the arts.
Contributors: Teresa Brennan, Patrick Clancy, Verena Andermatt Conley, Scott Durham, Thierry de Duve, Françoise Gaillard, Félix Guattari, N. Katherine Hayles, Alberto Moreiras, Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell, Ingrid Scheibler, Paul Virilio.
Edited by Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Miami Theory Collective (Oxford, Ohio)
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1993
ISBN 0816622159, 9780816622153
248 pages
André Nusselder: Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, cyborgs, fantasy, philosophy, philosophy of technology, psychoanalysis, screen, technology
Cyberspace is first and foremost a mental space. Therefore we need to take a psychological approach to understand our experiences in it. In Interface Fantasy, André Nusselder uses the core psychoanalytic notion of fantasy to examine our relationship to computers and digital technology. Lacanian psychoanalysis considers fantasy to be an indispensable “screen” for our interaction with the outside world; Nusselder argues that, at the mental level, computer screens and other human-computer interfaces incorporate this function of fantasy: they mediate the real and the virtual.
Interface Fantasy illuminates our attachment to new media: why we love our devices; why we are fascinated by the images on their screens; and how it is possible that virtual images can provide physical pleasure. Nusselder puts such phenomena as avatars, role playing, cybersex, computer psychotherapy, and Internet addiction in the context of established psychoanalytic theory. The virtual identities we assume in virtual worlds, exemplified best by avatars consisting of both realistic and symbolic self-representations, illustrate the three orders that Lacan uses to analyze human reality: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.
Nusselder analyzes our most intimate involvement with information technology—the almost invisible, affective aspects of technology that have the greatest impact on our lives. Interface Fantasy lays the foundation for a new way of thinking that acknowledges the pivotal role of the screen in the current world of information. And it gives an intelligible overview of basic Lacanian principles (including fantasy, language, the virtual, the real, embodiment, and enjoyment) that shows their enormous relevance for understanding the current state of media technology.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
Short Circuits series
ISBN 0262513005, 9780262513005
Length 176 pages
Ken Hillis: Digital Sensations. Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · camera obscura, cyberspace, cyborgs, technological determinism, technology, telepresence, virtual reality, virtuality
Considers the cultural and philosophical assumptions underlying virtual reality, and how the technology affects the real world.
Virtual reality is in the news and in the movies, on TV and in the air. Why is the technology—or the idea—so prevalent precisely now? What does it mean—what does it do—to us? Digital Sensations looks closely at the ways representational forms generated by communication technologies—especially digital/optical virtual technologies—affect the “lived” world.
Virtual reality, or VR, is a technological reproduction of the process of perceiving the real; yet that process is “filtered” through the social realities and embedded cultural assumptions about human bodies, perception, and space held by the technology’s creators.
Through critical histories of the technology—of vision, light, space, and embodiment—Ken Hillis traces the various and often contradictory intellectual and metaphysical impulses behind the Western transcendental wish to achieve an ever more perfect copy of the real. Because virtual technologies are new, these histories also address the often unintended and underconsidered consequences–such as alienating new forms of surveillance and commodification–flowing from their rapid dissemination. Current and proposed virtual technologies reflect a Western desire to escape the body, Hillis says.
Exploring topics from VR and other, earlier visual technologies, Hillis’s penetrating perspective on the cultural power of place and space broadens our view of the interplay between social relations and technology.
Volume 1 of Electronic mediations
Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 1999
ISBN 0816632510, 9780816632510
Length 271 pages
David Bell: Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberculture, cyberspace, cyborgs, internet, network society, screen, virtual reality
This book surveys a ‘cluster’ of works that seek to explore the cultures of cyberspace, the Internet and the information society. It introduces key ideas, and includes detailed discussion of the work of two key thinkers in this area, Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway, as well as outlining the development of cyberculture studies as a field. To do this, the book also explores selected ‘moments’ in this development, from the early 1990s, when cyberspace and cyberculture were only just beginning to come together as ideas, up to the present day, when the field of cyberculture studies has grown and bloomed, producing innovative theoretical and empirical work from a diversity of standpoints. Key topics include:
* Life on the screen
* Network society
* Space of flows
* Cyborg methods
Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-415-32431-1
Length 161 pages
Peter Lunenfeld (ed.): The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, digital cinema, hypertext, image, internet, pornography, virtual reality
The Digital Dialectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. The essays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious but accessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new cultural forms.
Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262621371, 9780262621373
Length 320 pages
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Comment (0)Vincent Mosco: The Digital Sublime. Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, economics, media, technology
The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world.
Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture—specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics—we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it “with both eyes”—that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.
After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances—the telephone, the radio, and television, among others—Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center—our icons of communication, information, and trade—and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.
Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN: 0-262-13439-X, 978-0-262-13439-2
232 pages
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Comment (0)Ronald E. Day: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, critical theory, cybernetics, cyberspace, cyborgs, deterritorialization, information society, information technology, information theory, mass media, technological determinism, utopia
Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information in the twentieth century. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.
After laying the groundwork and justifying his method of close reading for this study, Day examines the texts of two pre-World War II documentalists, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Through the work of Otlet and Briet, Day shows how documentation and information were associated with concepts of cultural progress. Day also discusses the social expansion of the conduit metaphor in the works of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener. He then shows how the work of contemporary French multimedia theorist Pierre Lévy refracts the earlier philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through the prism of the capitalist understanding of the “virtual society.”
Turning back to the pre-World War II period, Day examines two critics of the information society: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. He explains Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the information culture’s model of language and truth as well as Benjamin’s aesthetic and historical critique of mass information and communication. Day concludes by contemplating the relation of critical theory and information, particularly in regard to the information culture’s transformation of history, historiography, and historicity into positive categories of assumed and represented knowledge.
Publisher SIU Press, 2008
ISBN 0809328488, 9780809328482
Length 152 pages
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Bruce Sterling: The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992) [English/Czech]
Filed under book | Tags: · cybercrime, cyberspace, hacking, software, telephone
The AT&T long-distance network crashes, and millions of calls go unanswered. A computer hacker reprograms a switching station, and calls to a Florida probation office are shunted to a New York phone-sex hotline. An underground computer bulletin board publishes a pilfered BellSouth document on the 911 emergency system, making it available to anyone who dials up. How did so much illicit power reach the hands of an undisciplined few – and what should be done about it?
The book discusses watershed events in the hacker subculture in the early 1990s. The most notable topic covered is Operation Sundevil and the events surrounding the 1987-1990 war on the Legion of Doom network: the raid on Steve Jackson Games, the trial of “Knight Lightning” (one of the original journalists of Phrack), and the subsequent formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The book also profiles the likes of “Emmanuel Goldstein” (publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly), the former Assistant Attorney General of Arizona Gail Thackeray, FLETC instructor Carlton Fitzpatrick, Mitch Kapor, and John Perry Barlow.
In 1994, Sterling released the book for the Internet with a new afterword.
Publisher Bantam Books, 1992
ISBN 0-553-56370-X
Length 323 pages
Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use
Audiobook by Cory Doctorow.
Czech translation by Václav Bárta
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Peter Lunenfeld: The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · collage, cyberspace, digital cinema, hypertext, interactivity, internet, screen, technology, virtual reality
The Digital Dialectic is an interdisciplinary jam session about our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms. Unlike purely academic texts on new media, the book includes contributions by scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs, who combine theoretical investigations with hands-on analysis of the possibilities (and limitations) of new technology. The key concept is the digital dialectic: a method to ground the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. The essays move beyond journalistic reportage and hype into serious but accessible discussion of new technologies, new media, and new cultural forms.
Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN 0262621371, 9780262621373
Length 320 pages
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Comment (0)Roy Ascott (ed.): Reframing Consciousness (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, chaos theory, conceptual art, consciousness, cyberspace, electronic art, hypermedia, interface, memory, science, technology, telematics, telepresence, virtual reality, vrml
We are in the middle of a process of complex cultural transformation, but to what extent is this matched by the transformation in the way we see ourselves? This book covers a wide-ranging discussion on the interaction between Art, Science and Technology, and goes on to challenge assumptions about ‘reality’.
Loosely themed around four key elements of Mind, Body, Art and Values, the editor leads the investigation through the familiar territories of interactive media and artificial life, combining them with new and ancient ideas about creativity and personal identity.The contributing authors number over sixty highly respected practitioners and theorists in art and science, bringing to the subject a stimulating diversity of approach and a rich background of knowledge.
Art has long been preoccupied with questions involving the mind and consciousness. But it is fast finding that new technology, creatively applied, brings new possibilities to bear. This volume provides a strong foundation for the debates that are sure to follow in this field.
Publisher Intellect Books, 1999
ISBN 1841500135, 9781841500133
Length 314 pages
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Daniel Dinello: Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · aliens, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cryonics, cybernetics, cyberspace, cyborgs, fiction, genetics, nanotechnology, posthumanism, robotics, science fiction, technology, transhumanism, utopia
Techno-heaven or techno-hell? If you believe many scientists working in the emerging fields of twenty-first-century technology, the future is blissfully bright. Initially, human bodies will be perfected through genetic manipulation and the fusion of human and machine; later, human beings will completely shed the shackles of pain, disease, and even death, as human minds are downloaded into death-free robots whereby they can live forever in a heavenly “posthuman” existence. In this techno-utopian future, humanity will be saved by the godlike power of technology.
If you believe the authors of science fiction, however, posthuman evolution marks the beginning of the end of human freedom, values, and identity. Our dark future will be dominated by mad scientists, rampaging robots, killer clones, and uncontrollable viruses. In this timely new book, Daniel Dinello examines “the dramatic conflict between the techno-utopia promised by real-world scientists and the techno-dystopia predicted by science fiction.”
Organized into chapters devoted to robotics, bionics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and other significant scientific advancements, this book summarizes the current state of each technology, while presenting corresponding reactions in science fiction. Dinello draws on a rich range of material, including films, television, books, and computer games, and argues that science fiction functions as a valuable corrective to technological domination, countering techno-hype and reflecting the “weaponized, religiously rationalized, profit-fueled” motives of such science. By imaging a disastrous future of posthuman techno-totalitarianism, science fiction encourages us to construct ways to contain new technology, and asks its audience perhaps the most important question of the twenty-first century: is technology out of control?
Publisher University of Texas Press, 2005
ISBN 0292709862, 9780292709867
Length 329 pages
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Jennifer Terry, Melodie Calvert (eds.): Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (1997)
Filed under book | Tags: · cyberspace, cyborgs, everyday, feminism, gender, internet, postmodernism, technology
Considers how the terms of gender are embodied in technologies, and conversely, how technologies shape our notions of gender. The contributors explore the complex territory between the lust for, and the fear of, technology, commenting on the ambivalence women experience in relation to machines. Discussing topics such as embryonic fertilization, the virtual female, networking women, the sexuality of computers, surveillance systems, UFOs, and the emancipation of Barbie,
Processed Lives offers a provocative, visually rich critical approach to th multifaceted relationships between masculinity, femininity and machines. Contributors: Barbie Liberation Organization, Ericka Beckman, Lisa Cartwright, Gregg Bordowitz, Sara Diamond, Judith Halberstam, Evelynn Hammonds, Kathy High, David Horn, Ira Livingston, Bonita Makuch, Margaret Morse, Soheir Morsy, Liss Platt, B Ruby Rich, Connie Samaras, Joya Saunders, Julia Scher, Andrea Slane, Mary Ellen Strom, Christime Tamblyn, Nina Wakeford.
Publisher Routledge, 1997
ISBN 0415149320, 9780415149327
Length 248 pages
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