Download or read book Imaginary Futures written by Richard Barbrook and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2007-04-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.
Download or read book Imaginary Futures written by Richard Barbrook and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2007-04-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the MEA's 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology.'A compelling, authoritative, and painstakingly documented narrative, Imaginary Futures traces the emergence of the computer era in the context of desperately competing ideologies, economics, and empires. This is a work of passionate and persuasive scholarship by a contemporary social theorist at the top of his game.'Douglas Rushkoff, author, Coercion, Media Virus, Get Back in the Box.'Imaginary Futures gives insight into how the dominant utopias of today were shaped in the time of the Cold War and served the ideological needs of the elites. While the Cold War West had a much better present, it was the Soviet East which had a vision of the future. The invention of a Western utopia became an important factor in the struggle for global power.'Boris Kagarlitsky, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Comparative Political Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences -- The future is now--Richard Barbrook argues that, at the height of the Cold War, the Americans invented a truly revolutionary tool: the Internet. Yet, for all of its libertarian potential, hi-tech science soon became a tool of geopolitical dominance. The rest of the world was expected to follow America's path into the networked future. Today, we're still told that the Net is creating the information society. Barbrook shows how we can reclaim its revolutionary purpose: how the DIY ethic of the internet can help people shape information technologies in their own interest and reinvent their own, improved visions of the future.
Download or read book Imaginary Futures written by Richard Barbrook and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history of the future. It shows how our contemporary understanding of the Net is shaped by visions of the future that were put together in the 1950s and 1960s.
Download or read book Imaginary Futures written by Richard Barbrook and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2007-04-20 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.
Download or read book The Future Imaginary in Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures written by Kristina Baudemann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the future in Indigenous North American speculative literature and digital arts. Asking how different Indigenous works imagine the future and how they negotiate settler colonial visions of what is to come, the chapters illustrate that the future is not an immutable entity but a malleable textual/digital product that can function as both a colonial tool and a catalyst for decolonization. Central to this study is the development of a methodology that helps unearth the signifying structures producing the future in selected works by Darcie Little Badger, Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, Skawennati, Danis Goulet, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Postcommodity, Kite, Jeff Barnaby, and Ryan Singer. Drawing on Jason Lewis’s "future imaginary" as the theoretical core, the book describes the various forms of textual representation and virtual simulation through which notions of Indigenous continuation are expressed in literary and new media works. Arguing that Indigenous authors and artists apply the aesthetics of the future as a strategy in their works, the volume conceptualizes its multimedia corpus as a continuously growing archive of, and for, Indigenous futures.
Download or read book Imagined Futures written by Jens Beckert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How do these actors assess uncertainty? Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by showing how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when imagined futures fail to materialize.
Download or read book When the Future Disappears written by Janet Poole and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a panoramic view of Korea's dynamic literary production in the final decade of Japanese rule, When the Future Disappears locates the imprint of a new temporal sense in Korean modernism: the impression of time interrupted, with no promise of a future. As colonial subjects of an empire headed toward total war, Korean writers in this global fascist moment produced some of the most sophisticated writings of twentieth-century modernism. Yi T'aejun, Ch'oe Myongik, Im Hwa, So Insik, Ch'oe Chaeso, Pak T'aewon, Kim Namch'on, and O Changhwan, among other Korean writers, lived through a rare colonial history in which their vernacular language was first inducted into the modern, only to be shut out again through the violence of state power. The colonial suppression of Korean-language publications was an effort to mobilize toward war, and it forced Korean writers to face the loss of their letters and devise new, creative forms of expression. Their remarkable struggle reflects the stark foreclosure at the heart of the modern colonial experience. Straddling cultural, intellectual, and literary history, this book maps the different strategies, including abstraction, irony, paradox, and even silence, that Korean writers used to narrate life within the Japanese empire.
Download or read book Future Cinema written by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2003 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the ZKM Institute for Visual Media, explores the history and significance of pre-cinema and of early experimental cinema, as well as the development of the unique theaters in which "immersion" evolved. 1,000 illustrations.
Download or read book The Imagination Machine written by Martin Reeves and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide for mining the imagination to find powerful new ways to succeed. We need imagination now more than ever—to find new opportunities, rethink our businesses, and discover paths to growth. Yet too many companies have lost their ability to imagine. What is this mysterious capacity? How does imagination work? And how can organizations keep it alive and harness it in a systematic way? The Imagination Machine answers these questions and more. Drawing on the experience and insights of CEOs across several industries, as well as lessons from neuroscience, computer science, psychology, and philosophy, Martin Reeves of Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute and Jack Fuller, an expert in neuroscience, provide a fascinating look into the mechanics of imagination and lay out a process for creating ideas and bringing them to life: The Seduction: How to open yourself up to surprises The Idea: How to generate new ideas The Collision: How to rethink your idea based on real-world feedback The Epidemic: How to spread an evolving idea to others The New Ordinary: How to turn your novel idea into an accepted reality The Encore: How to repeat the process—again and again. Imagination is one of the least understood but most crucial ingredients of success. It's what makes the difference between an incremental change and the kinds of pivots and paradigm shifts that are essential to transformation—especially during a crisis. The Imagination Machine is the guide you need to demystify and operationalize this powerful human capacity, to inject new life into your company, and to head into unknown territory with the right tools at your disposal.
Download or read book Imaginary Communities written by Phillip Wegner and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-06-04 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha.
Download or read book Dreamscapes of Modernity written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-09-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies.
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Download or read book Media Virus written by Douglas Rushkoff and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most virulent viruses today are composed of information. In this information-driven age, the easiest way to manipulate the culture is through the media. A hip and caustically humorous McLuhan for the '90s, culture watcher Douglas Rushkoff now offers a fascinating expose of media manipulation in today's age of instant information.
Download or read book Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary written by Shazia Sadaf and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.
Download or read book Get Back in the Box written by Douglas Rushkoff and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2005-12-13 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a landscape that seems to be transforming itself with every new technology, marketing tactic, or investment strategy, businesses rush to embrace change by trading in their competencies or shifting their focus altogether. All in the name of innovation. But this endless worrying, wriggling, and trend watching only alienates companies from whatever it is they really do best. In the midst of the headlong rush to think "outside the box," the full engagement responsible for true innovation is lost. New consultants, new packaging, new marketing schemes, or even new CEOs are no substitute for the evolution of our own expertise as individuals and as businesses. Indeed, for all their talk about innovation, most companies today are still scared to death of it. To Douglas Rushkoff, this disconnect is not only predictable but welcome. It marks the happy end of a business cycle that began as long ago as the Renaissance, and ended with the renaissance in creativity and collaboration we're going through today. The age of mass production, mass media, and mass marketing may be over, but so, too, is the alienation it engendered between producers and consumers, managers and employees, executives and shareholders, and, worst of all, businesses and their own core values and competencies. American enterprise, in particular, is at a crossroads. Having for too long replaced innovation with acquisitions, tactics, efficiencies, and ad campaigns, many businesses have dangerously lost touch with the process -- and fun -- of discovery. "American companies are obsessed with window dressing," Rushkoff writes, "because they're reluctant, no, afraid to look at whatever it is they really do and evaluate it from the inside out. When things are down, CEOs look to consultants and marketers to rethink, rebrand, or repackage whatever it is they are selling, when they should be getting back on the factory floor, into the stores, or out to the research labs where their product is actually made, sold, or conceived." Rushkoff backs up his arguments with a myriad of intriguing historical examples as well as familiar gut checks -- from the dumbwaiter and open source to Volkswagen and The Gap -- in this accessible, thought-provoking, and immediately applicable set of insights. Here's all the help innovators of this era need to reconnect with their own core competencies as well as the passion fueling them.
Download or read book Futures and Fictions written by Simon O'Sullivan and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Futures and Fictions is a book of essays and conversations that explore possibilities for a different ‘political imaginary’ or, more simply, the imagining and imaging of alternate narratives and image-worlds that might be pitched against the impasses of our neoliberal present. In particular, the book contributes to prescient discussions around decolonization, post-capitalism and new kinds of social movements – exploring the intersections of these with contemporary art practice and visual culture. Contributions range from work on science, sonic and financial fictions and alternative space-time plots to myths and images generated by marginalized and ‘minor’ communities, queer-feminist strategies of fictioning, and the production of new Afro- and other futurisms. Contributors to thsi volume include Ursula K. Le Guin, Theo Reeves-Evisson, Bridget Crone, Kodwo Eshun, Louis Moreno, Laboria Cuboniks, Luciana Parisi, Stefan Helmreich, Mark Fisher, Judy Thorne, Annett Busch, Harold Offeh, Robin Mackay, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Kemang Wa Lehulere, and Oreet Ashery.
Download or read book Future Cities written by Paul Dobraszczyk and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though reaching ever further toward the skies, today’s cities are overshadowed by multiple threats: climate change, overpopulation, social division, and urban warfare all endanger our metropolitan way of life. The fundamental tool we use to make sense of these uncertain city futures is the imagination. Architects, artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have long been inspired to imagine cities of the future, but their speculative visions tend to be seen very differently from scientific predictions: flights of fancy on the one hand versus practical reasoning on the other. In a digital age when the real and the fantastic coexist as near equals, it is especially important to know how these two forces are entangled, and how together they may help us best conceive of cities yet to come. Exploring a breathtaking range of imagined cities—submerged, floating, flying, vertical, underground, ruined, and salvaged—Future Cities teases out the links between speculation and reality, arguing that there is no clear separation between the two. In the Netherlands, prototype floating cities are already being built; Dubai’s recent skyscrapers resemble those of science-fiction cities of the past; while makeshift settlements built by the urban poor in the developing world are already like the dystopian cities of cyberpunk. Bringing together architecture, fiction, film, and visual art, Paul Dobraszczyk reconnects the imaginary city with the real, proposing a future for humanity that is firmly grounded in the present and in the diverse creative practices already at our fingertips.
