Download or read book Informed Consent written by Lisa R. Schiff and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How many Americans are homeless? Although taking a census may sound simple, ensuring an accurate count is the least of its problems. Census takers in all walks of life exercise great care in determining what information is to be collected, how it is to be recorded, and how the findings are ultimately to be presented. But who decides which evaluation frameworks and indicators are to be used? Do all concerned-census takers and respondents view those indicators in the same manner? Do institutional and social imperatives outweigh individual bias and perspective? And if so, is that really what we want? Informed Consent analyzes the interplay between ideology and information. Through extensive research on how information about the homeless is generated and interpreted, Lisa Schiff offers both hard evidence and a convincing argument for questioning "how service providers create forms and clients complete them, how advocates administer surveys and public agencies compile counts." At the same time, she explores the day-to-day implications of her findings by demonstrating how competing understandings affect prevailing ideologies, which in turn affect our attempts at social change.
Download or read book The Ideology of Religious Studies written by Timothy Fitzgerald and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been an intensifying debate within the religious studies community about the validity of religion as an analytical category. In this book Fitzgerald sides with those who argue that the concept of religion itself should be abandoned. On the basis of his own research in India and Japan, and through a detailed analysis of the use of religion in a wide range of scholarly texts, the author maintains that the comparative study of religion is really a form of liberal ecumenical theology. By pretending to be a science, religion significantly distorts socio-cultural analysis. He suggest, however, that religious studies can be re-represented in a way which opens up new and productive theoretical connections with anthropology and cultural and literary studies.
Download or read book Ideology and Modern Culture written by John B. Thompson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this major new work, Thompson develops an original account of ideology and relates it to the analysis of culture and mass communication in modern Societies. Thompson offers a concise and critical appraisal of major contributions to the theory of ideology, from Marx and Mannheim, to Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas. He argues that these thinkers - and social and political theorists more generally - have failed to deal adequately with the nature of mass communication and its role in the modern world. In order to overcome this deficiency, Thompson undertakes a wide-ranging analysis of the development of mass communication, outlining a distinctive social theory of the mass media and their impact.
Download or read book The Political Lives of Information written by Janaki Srinivasan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender, and the implications for development. Information, says Janaki Srinivasan, has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. In this study, she examines the history of the idea of “information” and its political implications for poverty alleviation. She presents three cases in India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—to explore three uses of information to support goals of social change. Countering claims that information is naturally and universally empowering, Srinivasan shows how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are shaped by caste, class, and gender. Srinivasan draws on archival and ethnographic research to challenge the idea of information as objective and factual. Using the concept of an “information order,” she examines how the meaning and value of information reflect the social relations in which it is embedded. She asks why casting information as a tool of development and solution to poverty appeals to actors across the political spectrum. She also shows how the power to label some things information and others not is at least as significant as the capacity to subsequently produce, access, and leverage information. The more faith we place in what information can do, she cautions, the less attention we pay to its political lives and to the role of specific social structures, individual agency, and material form in the defining, production, and use of that information.
Download or read book The Costs of Connection written by Nick Couldry and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate profit. The Costs of Connection uncovers this process, this "data colonialism," and its designs for controlling our lives—our ways of knowing; our means of production; our political participation. Colonialism might seem like a thing of the past, but this book shows that the historic appropriation of land, bodies, and natural resources is mirrored today in this new era of pervasive datafication. Apps, platforms, and smart objects capture and translate our lives into data, and then extract information that is fed into capitalist enterprises and sold back to us. The authors argue that this development foreshadows the creation of a new social order emerging globally—and it must be challenged. Confronting the alarming degree of surveillance already tolerated, they offer a stirring call to decolonize the internet and emancipate our desire for connection.
Download or read book Cultural Software written by J. M. Balkin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book J. M. Balkin offers a strikingly original theory of cultural evolution, a theory that explains shared understandings, disagreement, and diversity within cultures. Drawing on many fields of study--including anthropology, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology, and law--the author explores how cultures grow and spread, how shared understandings arise, and how people of different cultures can understand and evaluate each other's views. Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural information and know-how--cultural software--in human minds, Balkin says. Individuals embody cultural software and spread it to others through communication and social learning. Ideology, the author contends, is neither a special nor a pathological form of thought but an ordinary product of the evolution of cultural software. Because cultural understanding is a patchwork of older imperfect tools that are continually adapted to solve new problems, human understanding is partly adequate and partly inadequate to the pursuit of justice. Balkin presents numerous examples that illuminate the sources of ideological effects and their contributions to injustice. He also enters the current debate over multiculturalism, applying his theory to problems of mutual understanding between people who hold different worldviews. He argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals and shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible.
Download or read book Web Theory written by Robert Burnett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-02-24 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Web Theory is a comprehensive and critical introduction to the theories of the internet and the world wide web. Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall examine the key debates which surround internet culture, from issues of globalisation, political economy and regulation, to ideas about communication, identity and aesthetics. Web Theory explore the shifts in society, culture and the media which have been brought about by the growth of the world wide web. It identifies significant readings, web sites and hypertext archive sources which illustrate the critical discussion about the internet and it mediates these discussions, indicating key positions within each debate and pointing the reader to key texts. Web Theory includes: *Chapters showing how specific media have been affected by the internet *Boxed case studies and examples *References, an extensive bibliography and a list of web sites *A glossary of key terms with important words highlighted in the text *A Web Theory timeline which details important events *A comprehensive and regularly updated website at www.webtheory.nu with inks and support material
Download or read book Ideology in America written by Christopher Ellis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public opinion in the United States contains a paradox. The American public is symbolically conservative: it cherishes the symbols of conservatism and is more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal. Yet at the same time, it is operationally liberal, wanting government to do and spend more to solve a variety of social problems. This book focuses on understanding this contradiction. It argues that both facets of public opinion are real and lasting, not artifacts of the survey context or isolated to particular points in time. By exploring the ideological attitudes of the American public as a whole, and the seemingly conflicted choices of individual citizens, it explains the foundations of this paradox. The keys to understanding this large-scale contradiction, and to thinking about its consequences, are found in Americans' attitudes with respect to religion and culture and in the frames in which elite actors describe policy issues.
Download or read book Intellectual Morons written by Daniel J. Flynn and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2004-09-21 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do well-educated antiwar activists call the president of the United States “the new Hitler” and argue that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 attacks? Why does Al Gore believe that cars pose “a mortal threat to the security of every nation”? Why does the Princeton professor known as the father of the animal rights movement object to humans eating animals but not to humans having sex with them—and why does PETA defend that position? In other words, why do smart people fall for stupid ideas? The answer, Daniel J. Flynn reveals in Intellectual Morons, is ideology. Flynn, the author of Why the Left Hates America, shows how people can be so blinded to reality by the causes they serve that they espouse bizarre, sometimes ridiculous, and often dangerous positions. The most influential social movements have spawned ideologues who do not care whether an idea is good or bad, true or false, but only whether it can serve their cause. It is startling how many Americans—and particularly how many media, academic, and political elites—fall for bad ideas. The trouble is, their lies become institutionalized as truth, and we all suffer as a result. In Intellectual Morons, Flynn reveals: •How rabid anti-Americans simply parrot the delusional claims of a few gurus •How the environmental movement, spawned by a “scientist” whose doomsday predictions are almost always wrong, has bred fanaticism, stupidity, and dishonesty •How the hero of the animal rights crowd is a crank who promotes infanticide and euthanasia •How a scientific fraud—and pervert—launched the sexual revolution •How abortion rights activists ignore (or cover up) the fact that their matron saint advocated eugenics and concentration camps •How our universities have become hothouses of leftist ideology •How historians and journalists have airbrushed history to turn a racial separatist into a civil rights icon Filled with jaw-dropping lapses in common sense from even our most celebrated opinion leaders, Intellectual Morons is a welcome reality check for the glaring excesses of today’s political and cultural debates. "This is a sophisticated pile driver of a book, guiding us through the wiles of great luminaries of the netherworld. And such liveliness in the writing, and such erudition. I was quite fascinated by Intellectual Morons."—William F. Buckley, Jr. "Intellectual Morons is exceptionally aptly named. The thought of all that brainpower going down the intellectual drain is sad, but Daniel Flynn's description of it is hilariously on point. This is must reading."—G. Gordon Liddy "Intellectual Morons is a delight—a wonderful intellectual history of the past hundred years. Flynn ably describes the purveyors of the bad ideas that have undermined our free society."—Burton W. Folsom, Jr., professor of history, Hillsdale College "A famous bit of folk wisdom says, 'You've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything.' Some of the crackpot notions now fashionable in academic circles, as here documented by Daniel Flynn, suggest that saying is an understatement. If you want to know how crazy, and scairy, intellectual morons can get, you have to read this book."—M. Stanton Evans, author of The Theme Is Freedom, contributing editor to Human Events
Download or read book Ideology and Libraries written by Michael K. Buckland and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-11-13 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950 Robert L. Gitler went to Japan to found the first college-level school of library science in that country. His mission, an improbable success, was documented in an assisted autobiography as Robert Gitler and the Japan Library School (Scarecrow Press, 1999). Subsequent research into initiatives to improve library services during the Allied occupation has revealed surprising discoveries and human interest of the lives of very diverse individuals. A central role was played by a librarian, Philip Keeney, who later became well-known as an alleged communist spy. A national plan, designed for Japan’s libraries, was based directly on the county library system developed by progressive thinkers in California, itself a dramatic story. The School of Librarianship at the University of California and its founding director, Sydney Mitchell, was found to have deeply influenced key figures. The story also requires an appreciation of the deployment of American libraries abroad as tools of foreign policy, as cultural diplomacy. Meanwhile, library services in Japan were seriously underdeveloped, despite Japan’s extraordinarily high literacy rate, very well-developed publishing and book retail industries, and librarians who were far from backward. The difference in library development lay in the huge divergence between the ethos of the American public library (dominated by support for individual self-development and Western liberal democracy) and the evolving political ideology of Japanese governments after the Meiji Restoration (1868). After absorbing authoritarian French and German administrative practices Japan became a militarist dictatorship from the 1920s onwards until surrender in 1945. The literature on the Allied Occupation of Japan is vast, but library services have received very little attention beyond the creation of the National Diet Library in 1948. The story of initiatives to improve library services in occupied Japan, the role of libraries as cultural diplomacy, the dramatic development of free public library services in California have remained unknown or little known – until now.
Download or read book Ideologies of the Internet written by Katharine Sarikakis and published by Hampton Press (NJ). This book was released on 2006 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers together some of the most significant debates surrounding the development, use and potential of the Internet. Twenty scholars from four continents address some of the more pertinent questions surrounding the presence and future of the Internet. These are organized into questions regarding the role of the Internet as a mediator of communicative space and process; an object of current and future policy; and a tool for development. The debates are proceeded by a discussion on the contextual positioning of the medium in terms of arts, the market, gender, and education.
Download or read book Nationalism on the Internet written by Christian Fuchs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this timely book, critical theorist Christian Fuchs asks: What is nationalism and what is the role of social media in the communication of nationalist ideology? Advancing an applied Marxist theory of nationalism, Fuchs explores nationalist discourse in the world of contemporary digital capitalism that is shaped by social media, big data, fake news, targeted advertising, bots, algorithmic politics, and a high-speed online attention economy. Through two case studies of the German and Austrian 2017 federal elections, the book goes on to develop a critical theory of nationalism that is grounded in the works of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eric J. Hobsbawm. Advanced students and scholars of Marxism, nationalism, media, and politics won't want to miss Fuchs' latest in-depth study of social media and politics that uncovers the causes, structures, and consequences of nationalism in the age of social media and fake news.
Download or read book Hitler s Ideology written by Richard A. Koenigsberg and published by IAP. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Originally published as: Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology) Why did Hitler initiate the Final Solution and take Germany to war? Based on analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric—the words, images and metaphors contained within his writing and speeches—Koenigsberg’s study reveals the “hidden narratives” that were the source of Hitler’s ideology and the Holocaust. Koenigsberg’s book was the first to study political rhetoric from the perspective of embodied metaphor. Conceiving of the Jew as a “force of disintegration,” parasite, and as a bacteria within the German body politic, the Final Solution represented a struggle to destroy the source of Germany’s disease—and thereby to save the nation. Hitler often is thought of as an anomaly. Koenigsberg’s classic study demonstrates that Hitler acted based on the conventional ideology of nationalism: devotion to one’s nation and a desire to destroy its enemies; willingness to die and kill—to sacrifice lives—in the name of a sacred object. Hitler’s actions—the history he created—followed as a logical consequence of the ideology that he promoted. Hitler imagined that by destroying the Jewish disease—source of death—Germany might live forever. The Final Solution grew out of a fantasy about an immortal body (politic). Richard Koenigsberg received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. He has been writing and lecturing on Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust for nearly forty years. Formerly a Professor of Behavioral Science, he presently is Director of the Center for the Study of War, Genocide and Terrorism. His online writings have generated excitement throughout the world.
Download or read book The Ideology of Genre written by Thomas O. Beebee and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genre counters both formalists and advocates of the &"death of genre,&" arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres &"collide&" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the use-value of language.
Download or read book Techniques of Close Reading written by Barry Brummett and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Techniques of Close Reading, Second Edition helps you gain a deeper understanding of what texts may be saying, whether they are written, oral, visual, or mediated. Renowned scholar and professor Barry Brummett explains and explores the various ways to "read" messages (such as speeches, cartoons, or magazine ads), teaching you how to see deeper levels of meaning and to share those insights with others. You will learn techniques for discovering form, rhetorical tropes, argument, and ideologies within texts. New to the Second Edition: A new Chapter 6 includes a selection of techniques from each chapter to show you how different techniques may be used together when reading text. A close reading of a group of ads from the insurance company, Liberty Mutual, offers you an opportunity to apply the techniques to recent texts.
Download or read book The Ideology of Hatred The Psychic Power of Discourse written by Niza Yanay and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book suggests that untying and recognising relations of intimacy and dependency can, under certain circumstances, change the discourse of hatred into relations of peace and even friendship.
Download or read book Librarianship and Legitimacy written by Douglas Raber and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1997-10-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the history and significance of the Public Library Inquiry of the late 1940s, which sought "to study and document the conditions, achievements, and weaknesses of public libraries and librarianship."--Page 4.
