Download or read book Technopoly written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Strange Weather written by Andrew Ross and published by Verso. This book was released on 1991-09-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who speaks for science in a technologically dominated society? In his latest work of cultural criticism Andrew Ross contends that this question yields no simple or easy answer. In our present technoculture a wide variety of people, both inside and outside the scientific community, have become increasingly vocal in exercising their right to speak about, on behalf of, and often against, science and technology. Arguing that science can only ever be understood as a social artifact, Strange Weather is a manifesto which calls on cultural critics to abandon their technophobia and contribute to the debates which shape our future. Each chapter focuses on an idea, a practice or community that has established an influential presence in our culture: New Age, computer hacking, cyberpunk, futurology, and global warming. In a book brimming over with intelligence—both human and electronic—Ross examines the state of scientific countercultures in an age when the development of advanced information technologies coexists uneasily with ecological warnings about the perils of unchecked growth. Intended as a contribution to a “green” cultural criticism, Strange Weather is a provocative investigation of the ways in which science is shaping the popular imagination of today, and delimiting the possibilities of tomorrow.
Download or read book Amusing Ourselves to Death written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the effects of television culture on how we conduct our public affairs and how "entertainment values" corrupt the way we think.
Download or read book Transhumanism and the Image of God written by Jacob Shatzer and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We're constantly invited to think about the future of technology as a progressive improvement of tools: our gadgets will continue to evolve, but we humans will stay basically the same. In the future, perhaps even alien species and intelligent robots will coexist alongside humans, who will grapple with challenges and emerge as the heroes. But the truth is that radical technological change has the power to radically shape humans as well. We must be well informed and thoughtful about the steps we're already taking toward a transhuman or even posthuman future. Can we find firm footing on a slippery slope? Biblical ethicist Jacob Shatzer guides us into careful consideration of the future of Christian discipleship in a disruptive technological environment. In Transhumanism and the Image of God, Shatzer explains the development and influence of the transhumanist movement, which promotes a "next stage" in human evolution. Exploring topics such as artificial intelligence, robotics, medical technology, and communications tools, he examines how everyday technological changes have already altered and continue to change the way we think, relate, and understand reality. By unpacking the doctrine of the incarnation and its implications for human identity, he helps us better understand the proper place of technology in the life of the disciple and avoid false promises of a posthumanist vision. We cannot think about technology use today without considering who we will become tomorrow.
Download or read book Conscientious Objections written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of feisty and ultimately hopeful essays, one of America's sharpest social critics casts a shrewd eye over contemporary culture to reveal the worst -- and the best -- of our habits of discourse, tendencies in education, and obsessions with technological novelty. Readers will find themselves rethinking many of their bedrock assumptions: Should education transmit culture or defend us against it? Is technological innovation progress or a peculiarly American addiction? When everyone watches the same television programs -- and television producers don't discriminate between the audiences for Sesame Street and Dynasty -- is childhood anything more than a sentimental concept? Writing in the traditions of Orwell and H.L. Mencken, Neil Postman sends shock waves of wit and critical intelligence through the cultural wasteland.
Download or read book The End of Education written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive response to the education crisis, the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity returns to the subject that established his reputation as one of our most insightful social critics. Postman presents useful models with which schools can restore a sense of purpose, tolerance, and a respect for learning.
Download or read book Confronting Technopoly written by Phil Rose and published by Intellect (UK). This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1992, Neil Postman presciently coined the term "technopoly" to refer to "the surrender of culture to technology." This book brings together a number of contributors from different disciplinary perspectives to analyze technopoly both as a concept and as it is seen and understood in contemporary society. Contributors present both analysis of and strategies for managing socio-technical conflict, and they also open up a number of fruitful new lines of thought around emerging technological, social, and even psychological forms.
Download or read book The Disappearance of Childhood written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the vogue for nubile models to the explosion in the juvenile crime rate, this modern classic of social history and media traces the precipitous decline of childhood in America today−and the corresponding threat to the notion of adulthood. Deftly marshaling a vast array of historical and demographic research, Neil Postman, author of Technopoly, suggests that childhood is a relatively recent invention, which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults. But now these divisions are eroding under the barrage of television, which turns the adult secrets of sex and violence into poprular entertainment and pitches both news and advertising at the intellectual level of ten-year-olds. Informative, alarming, and aphorisitc, The Disappearance of Childhood is a triumph of history and prophecy.
Download or read book Teaching As a Subversive Activity written by Neil Postman and published by Delta. This book was released on 2009-11-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A no-holds-barred assault on outdated teaching methods—with dramatic and practical proposals on how education can be made relevant to today's world. Praise for Teaching As a Subversive Activity “A healthy dose of Postman and Weingartner is a good thing: if they make even a dent in the pious . . . American classroom, the book will be worthwhile.”—New York Times Book Review “Teaching and knowledge are subversive in that they necessarily substitute awareness for guesswork, and knowledge for experience. Experience is no use in the world of Apollo 8. It is simply necessary to know. However, it is also necessary to know the effect of Apollo 8 in creating a new Global Theatre in which student and teacher alike are looking for roles. Postman and Weingartner make excellent theatrical producers in the new Global Theatre.”—Marshall McLuhan “It will take courage to read this book . . . but those who are asking honest questions—what’s wrong with the worlds in which we live, how do we build communication bridges cross the Generation Gap, what do they want from us?—these people will squirm in the discovery that the answers are really within themselves.”—Saturday Review “Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner go beyond the now-familiar indictments of American education to propose basic ways of liberating both teachers and students from becoming personnel rather than people . . . the authors have created what may become a primer of ‘the new education’ Their book is intended for anyone, teacher or not, who is concerned with sanity and survival in a world of precipitously rapid change, and it’s worth your reading.”—Playboy “This challenging, liberating book can unlock not only teachers but anyone for whom language and learning are not dead.”—Nat Hentoff
Download or read book Building a Bridge to the 18th Century written by Neil Postman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-08 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when we are reexamining our values, reeling from the pace of change, witnessing the clash between good instincts and "pragmatism," dealing with the angst of a new millennium, Neil Postman, one of our most distinguished observers of contemporary society, provides for us a source of guidance and inspiration. In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century he revisits the Enlightenment, that great flowering of ideas that provided a humane direction for the future -- ideas that formed our nation and that we would do well to embrace anew. He turns our attention to Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin, and to their then-radical thinking about inductive science, religious and political freedom, popular education, rational commerce, the nation-state, progress, and happiness. Postman calls for a future connected to traditions that provide sane authority and meaningful purpose -- as opposed to an overreliance on technology and an increasing disregard for the lessons of history. And he argues passionately for specific new guidelines in the education of our children, with renewed emphasis on developing the intellect as successfully as we are developing a computer-driven world. Witty, provocative, and brilliantly reasoned, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is Neil Postman's most radical, and most commonsensical, book yet.
Download or read book A Way Through the Global Techno Scientific Culture written by Sheldon Richmond and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computers are supposed to be smart, yet they frustrate both ordinary users and computer technologists. Why are people frustrated by smart machines? Computers don’t fit people. People think in terms of comparisons, stories, and analogies, and seek feedback, whereas computers are based on a fundamental design that does not fit with analogical and feedback thinking. They impose a binary, an all-or-nothing, approach to everything. Moreover, the social world and institutions that have developed around computer technology hide and reinforce the lack of alignment between computers and people. This book suggests a solution: we do not have to accept the way things are now and work around the bad social and technical design of computers. Rather, it proposes a diverse, distributed, critical discussion of how to design and build both computer technology and its social institutions.
Download or read book Disruptive Democracy written by Peter Bloom and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do new "smart" technologies such as AI, robotics, social media, and automation threaten to disrupt our society? Or does technological innovation hold the potential to transform our democracies and civic societies, creating ones that are more egalitarian and accountable? Disruptive Democracy explores these questions and examines how technology has the power to reshape our civic participation, our economic and political governance, and our entire existence. In this innovative study, the authors use international examples such as Trump’s America, and Bolsonaro’s recent election as President of Brazil, to lead the discussion on perhaps the most profound political struggle of the 21st century, the coming clash between a progressive "Techno-democracy" and a regressive "Techno-populism".
Download or read book Gang Leader for a Day written by Sudhir Venkatesh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-01-10 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller "A rich portrait of the urban poor, drawn not from statistics but from vivid tales of their lives and his, and how they intertwined." —The Economist "A sensitive, sympathetic, unpatronizing portrayal of lives that are ususally ignored or lumped into ill-defined stereotype." —Finanical Times Foreword by Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics When first-year graduate student Sudhir Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects, he hoped to find a few people willing to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty--and impress his professors with his boldness. He never imagined that as a result of this assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade embedded inside the projects under JT’s protection. From a privileged position of unprecedented access, Venkatesh observed JT and the rest of his gang as they operated their crack-selling business, made peace with their neighbors, evaded the law, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang’s complex hierarchical structure. Examining the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, and often corrupt struggle to survive in an urban war zone, Gang Leader for a Day also tells the story of the complicated friendship that develops between Venkatesh and JT--two young and ambitious men a universe apart. Sudhir Venkatesh’s latest book Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy—a memoir of sociological investigation revealing the true face of America’s most diverse city—is also published by Penguin Press.
Download or read book The Corporate State written by Robert M. Orrange and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book critically examines key features of the contemporary organizational landscape by focusing on major beneficiaries of recent historical political-cultural transformations involving the embrace of market fundamentalism and a market society: namely, corporations, those who direct them, and those who use them for their own benefit. Part I examines the big US-based tech firms (i.e. Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon), highlighting numerous tensions and contradictions between their highly cultivated, flattering, yet unwarranted, public images and the reality of how they operate as extremely competitive, at times deceptive, profit-seeking entities. A focus on these firms also highlights just how dramatically the economic realm has been transformed over the past few decades due to accelerating advances in information technology and corporate-managed globalization. Part II explores how the state has been pushed back via privatization and corporate predation in such areas as health care, military/security, criminal justice, philanthropy, and education, and concludes by looking forward with a vision of a knowledge-caring society that must rebalance corporate-managed market fundamentalism. Through the use of clear cases that bring the theory to life for students, the book is ideal as a supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in a range of coursework in the fields of organizational theory and behavior, leadership in organizations, and management responsibility and business ethics. It will also be of great interest to students of sociology, specifically in the areas of complex organizations, economic sociology, theory, political sociology, and law and society"--
Download or read book The Big Switch Rewiring the World from Edison to Google written by Nicholas Carr and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-01-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Future Shock for the Web-apps era.... Compulsively readable—for nontechies, too."—Fast Company Building on the success of his industry-shaking Does IT Matter? Nicholas Carr returns with The Big Switch, a sweeping look at how a new computer revolution is reshaping business, society, and culture. Just as companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the newly built electric grid some hundred years ago, today it's computing that's turning into a utility. The effects of this transition will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. The Big Switch provides a panoramic view of the new world being conjured from the circuits of the "World Wide Computer." New for the paperback edition, the book now includes an A–Z guide to the companies leading this transformation.
Download or read book TechnoFeminism written by Judy Wajcman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely and engaging book argues that technoscientific advances are radically transforming the woman-machine relationship. However, it is feminist politics rather than the technologies themselves that make the difference. TechnoFeminism fuses the visionary insights of cyberfeminism with a materialist analysis of the sexual politics of technology.
Download or read book Crazy Talk Stupid Talk written by Neil Postman and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how to reduce ridiculous communication so that verbal behavior will not be an excessive burden.
