Hans van Maanen: How to Study Art Worlds. On the Societal Functioning of Aesthetic Values (2010)

This necessary and thought-provoking study brings together the organisational side of the world of the arts and the understanding of the many functions art fulfi lls in our culture. The author sets out to establish how the organisation of art worlds serves the functioning of the arts in society. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which presents a comparative study of approaches to the art world as practiced by Dickie, Becker, Bourdieu, Heinich, and Luhmann, among others. The second part focuses on the philosphical debates concerning ‘aesthetic experience’. Besides Kant, scholars such as Gadamer, Foster, Shustermann, Schaeffer and Carroll come to the fore. In the third part, the author traces the consequences of these theoretical approaches for the organization of art world practices.

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2010
ISBN 9089641521, 9789089641526
Length 256 pages

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Chris Rojek: The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time (2009)

Leisure has always been associated with freedom, choice and flexibility. The week-end and vacations were celebrated as ‘time off’. In his compelling new book, Chris Rojek turns this shibboleth on its head to demonstrate how leisure has become a form of labour.

Modern men and women are required to be competent, relevant and credible, not only in the work place but with their mates, children, parents and communities. The requisite empathy for others, socially acceptable values and correct forms of self-presentation demand work. Much of this work is concentrated in non-work activity, compromising traditional connections between leisure and freedom. Ranging widely from an analysis of the inflated aspirations of the leisure society thesis to the culture of deception that permeates leisure choice, Rojek shows how leisure is inextricably linked to emotional labour and intelligence. It is now a school for life.

In challenging the orthodox understandings of freedom and free time, The Labour of Leisure sets out an indispensable new approach to the meaning of leisure.

Publisher SAGE Publications Ltd, 2009
ISBN 1412945534, 9781412945530
Length 216 pages

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Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (2009)

Conventional wisdom about young people’s use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today’s teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth’s social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States.

Integrating twenty-three different case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.

This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

Authors Mizuko Ito, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Rachel Cody, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Heather A. Horst, Patricia G. Lange, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Z. Martinez, C. J. Pascoe, Dan Perkel, Laura Robinson, Christo Sims and Lisa Tripp
With Judd Antin, Megan Finn, Arthur Law, Annie Manion, Sarai Mitnick, David Scholssberg and Sarita Yardi
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning
ISBN 0262013363, 9780262013369
Length 432 pages

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John Palfrey, Urs Gasser: Born Digital. Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (2008)

The first generation of “Digital Natives”—children who were born into and raised in the digital world—are coming of age, and soon our world will be reshaped in their image. Our economy, our politics, our culture, and even the shape of our family life will be forever transformed. But who are these Digital Natives? And what is the world they’re creating going to look like? In Born Digital, leading Internet and technology experts John Palfrey and Urs Gasser offer a sociological portrait of these young people, who can seem, even to those merely a generation older, both extraordinarily sophisticated and strangely narrow. Exploring a broad range of issues, from the highly philosophical to the purely practical, Born Digital will be essential reading for parents, teachers, and the myriad of confused adults who want to understand the digital present—and shape the digital future.

Publisher Basic Books, 2008
ISBN 0465005152, 9780465005154
Length 375 pages

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Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler: Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002)

In this important book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?

As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.

In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida’s work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies.

Table of Contents
Artifactualities: Jacques Derrida.
Echographies of Television: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Chapter 1 Right of Inspection.
Chapter 2 Artifactuality, Homohegemony.
Chapter 3 Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology.
Chapter 4 Inheritances – and Rhythm.
Chapter 5 ‘Cultural Exception’: the States of the State, the Event.
Chapter 6 The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence.
Chapter 7 Phonographies: Meaning – from Heritage to Horizon.
Chapter 8 Spectrographies.
Chapter 9 Vigilances of the Unconscious.
The Discrete Image: Bernard Stiegler.
Notes

Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
Length 174 pages

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Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell: Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (2009)

What if you could remember everything? Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on their experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls. This experiment, and the system they created to support it, put them at the center of a movement studying the creation and enjoyment of e-memories.

Since then the three streams of technology feeding the Total Recall revolution—digital recording, digital storage, and digital search, have become gushing torrents. We are capturing so much of our lives now, be it on the date- and location-stamped photos we take with our smart phones or in the continuous records we have of our emails, instant messages, and tweets–not to mention the GPS tracking of our movements many cars and smart phones already do automatically. We are storing what we capture either out there in the “cloud” of services such as Facebook or on our very own increasingly massive and cheap hard drives. But the critical technology, and perhaps least understood, is our magical new ability to find the information we want in the mountain of data that is our past. And not just Google it, but data mine it so that, say, we can chart how much exercise we have been doing in the last four weeks in comparison with what we did four years ago. In health, education, work life, and our personal lives, the Total Recall revolution is going to change everything. As Bell and Gemmell show, it has already begun.

Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future. Imagine heart monitors woven into your clothes and tiny wearable audio and visual recorders automatically capturing what you see and hear. Imagine being able to summon up the e-memories of your great grandfather and his avatar giving you advice about whether or not to go to college, accept that job offer, or get married. The range of potential insights is truly awesome. But Bell and Gemmell also show how you can begin to take better advantage of this new technology right now. From how to navigate the serious question of privacy and serious problem of application compatibility to what kind of startups Bell is willing to invest in and which scanner he prefers, this is a book about a turning point in human knowledge as well as an immediate practical guide.

Total Recall is a technological revolution that will accomplish nothing less than a transformation in the way humans think about the meaning of their lives.

Foreword by Bill Gates
Publisher Dutton, 2009
ISBN 0525951342, 9780525951346
Length 288 pages

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Adam, Beck, van Loon (eds.): The Risk Society and Beyond. Critical Issues for Social Theory (2000)

Ulrich Beck’s best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck’s ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck.

Editors Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, Joost van Loon
Publisher SAGE, 2000
ISBN 076196469X, 9780761964698
Length 232 pages

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Gholam Khiabany: Iranian Media: The Paradox of Modernity (2009)

The post-revolutionary state in Iran has tried to amalgamate “Sharia with electricity” and modernity with what it considers as “Islam”. This process has been anything but smooth and has witnessed intensive forms of political and social contestation. This paper examines key aspects of the contradictions and tensions in the Iranian media market, social stratification and competing forms of “Islamism”/nationalism by looking at the context of production and consumption of the media in Iran. It provides an overview of the expansion of the Iranian communication system. By examining the role of the state in this process and the economic realities of the media in Iran, it challenges the one-dimensional liberal focus on the repressive role of the state and argues against the misguided view that sees a political economy view of the centrality of capital, class and the state to media as irrelevant in the global South. It suggests that the Iranian case also demonstrates a peculiar feature of the Iranian communication industry where liberalization and privatization are the order of the day, but where the state is still reluctant to give up its ideological control over the media. And this is another contradiction (or limit) of an overtly ideological state keen on “development” and “modernization” caught between the web of pragmatism and the imperative of the market, and the straightjacket of “Islamism”.

Publisher    Routledge, 2009
ISBN    0415962897, 9780415962896
Length    258 pages

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Tia DeNora: After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (2003)

Theodor W. Adorno placed music at the centre of his critique of modernity and broached some of the most important questions about the role of music in contemporary society. One of his central arguments was that music, through the manner of its composition, affected consciousness and was a means of social management and control. His work was primarily theoretical however, and because these issues were never explored empirically his work has become sidelined in current music sociology. This book argues that music sociology can be greatly enriched by a return to Adorno’s concerns, in particular his focus on music as a dynamic medium of social life. Intended as a guide to ‘how to do music sociology’ this book deals with critical topics too often sidelined such as aesthetic ordering, cognition, the emotions and music as a management device and reworks Adorno’s focus through a series of grounded examples.

•Hands on guide to how to do music sociology • First book to explore Adorno’s work within context of empirical music sociology and reassess his legacy • Develops a new approach to music sociology drawing on current musicological and sociology concerns

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2003
ISBN 052153724X, 9780521537247
Length 176 pages

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Tia DeNora: Music in Everyday Life (2000)

The power of music to influence mood, create scenes, routines and occasions is widely recognised and this is reflected in a strand of social theory from Plato to Adorno that portrays music as an influence on character, social structure and action. There have, however, been few attempts to specify this power empirically and to provide theoretically grounded accounts of music’s structuring properties in everyday experience. Music in Everyday Life uses a series of ethnographic studies – an aerobics class, karaoke evenings, music therapy sessions and the use of background music in the retail sector – as well as in-depth interviews to show how music is a constitutive feature of human agency. Drawing together concepts from psychology, sociology and socio-linguistics it develops a theory of music’s active role in the construction of personal and social life and highlights the aesthetic dimension of social order and organisation in late modern societies.

• The first book to show how music is used in daily life as a structuring device • Novel in its application of recent perspectives from the sociology of technology and material culture • Develops recent concern with the aesthetic dimension of social action

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2000
ISBN 052162732X, 9780521627320
Length 181 pages

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Theodor W. Adorno: Negative Dialektik (1966/1973/2001) [German/English]

Theodor Adorno was one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Negative Dialectics is his major and culminating work. In it he attempts to free critical thought from the blinding orthodoxies of late capitalism, and earlier ages too. The book is essential reading for students of Adorno. It is also a vital weapon for making sense of modern times.

German edition:
Title: Negative Dialektik
Publisher Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1966
Length 414 pages

English translation by E.B.Ashton:
Title: Negative Dialectics
Publisher Routledge, 1990
ISBN 0415052211, 9780415052214
Length 448 pages
First published in Great Britain in 1973 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
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Published 2001
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Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello: The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999/2005)

A century after the publication of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

Why is the critique of capitalism so ineffective today? In this major work, the sociologists Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski suggest that we should be addressing the crisis of anticapitalist critique by exploring its very roots.

Via an unprecedented analysis of management texts which influenced the thinking of employers and contributed to reorganization of companies over the last decades, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. From the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization which was founded on employee initiative and relative work autonomy, but at the cost of material and psychological security.

This new spirit of capitalism triumphed thanks to a remarkable recuperation of the “artistic critique”— that which, after May 1968, attacked the alienation of everyday life by capitalism and bureaucracy. At the same time, the “social critique” was disarmed by the appearance of neocapitalism and remained fixated on the old schemas of hierarchical production.

This book, remarkable for its scope and ambition, seeks to lay the basis for a revival of these two complementary critiques.

Publisher Verso, 2005
ISBN 1859845541, 9781859845547
Length 601 pages

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Marc Augé: Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995)

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in front of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Augé calls “non-space” results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner. Augé uses the concept of “supermodernity” to describe a situation of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating essay he seeks to establish an intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

Publisher Verso, 1995
ISBN 1859840515, 9781859840511
Length 122 pages

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John Tomlinson: The Culture of Speed. The Coming of Immediacy (2007)

Is the pace of life accelerating? If so, what are the cultural, social, personal and economic consequences?

This stimulating and accessible book examines how speed emerged as a cultural issue during industrial modernity. The rise of capitalist society and the shift to urban settings was rapid and tumultuous and was defined by the belief in ‘progress’. The first obstacle faced by societies that were starting to ’speed up’ was how to regulate and control the process. The attempt to regulate the acceleration of life created a new set of problems, namely the way in which speed escapes regulation and rebels against controls. This pattern of acceleration and control subsequently defined debates about the cultural effects of acceleration. However, in the 21st century ‘immediacy’, the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, has emerged as the core feature of control. This coming of immediacy will inexorably change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values.

Incisive and richly illustrated, this eye-opening account of speed and culture provides an original, essential guide to one of the central features of contemporary culture and personal life.

Publisher SAGE, 2007
ISBN 1412912024, 9781412912020
Length 180 pages

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Neil Postman: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1993)

Neil Postman is one of the most level-headed analysts of education, media, and technology, and in this book he spells out the increasing dependence upon technology, numerical quantification, and misappropriation of “Scientism” to all human affairs. No simple technophobe, Postman argues insightfully and writes with a stylistic flair, profound sense of humor, and love of language increasingly rare in our hastily scribbled e-mail-saturated world.

In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it–with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth.

Publisher Vintage Books, 1993
ISBN 0679745408, 9780679745402
Length 222 pages

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