Download or read book The Myth of the Machine The pentagon of power New explorations new worlds written by Lewis Mumford and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the forces that have shaped modern technology since prehistoric times. Mumford criticizes the modern trend of technology, which emphasizes constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement. He contends that these goals work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and overall human satisfaction. Modern technology fails to produce lasting, quality products by using devices such as consumer credit, installment buying, non-functioning and defective designs, built-in fragility, and frequent superficial "fashion" changes. "Without constant enticement by advertising," he writes, "production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year."
Download or read book The Myth of the Machine The pentagon of power New explorations new worlds written by Lewis Mumford and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth look at the forces that have shaped modern technology since prehistoric times. Mumford criticizes the modern trend of technology, which emphasizes constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement. He contends that these goals work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and overall human satisfaction. Modern technology fails to produce lasting, quality products by using devices such as consumer credit, installment buying, non-functioning and defective designs, built-in fragility, and frequent superficial "fashion" changes. "Without constant enticement by advertising," he writes, "production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year."
Download or read book The Experience of Place written by Tony Hiss and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some places--the concourse of Grand Central Terminal or a small farm or even the corner of a skyscraper--affect us so mysteriously and yet so forcefully? What tiny changes in our everyday environments can radically alter the quality of our daily lives? The Experience of Place offers an innovative and delightfully readable proposal for new ways of planning, building, and managing our most immediate and overlooked surroundings.
Download or read book Virtual Marshall McLuhan written by Donald F. Theall and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2001 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marshall McLuhan was a satirist and prophetic poet who explored subjects from the occult and the esoteric to everyday popular culture and the emerging digital revolution. Written in an accessible, engaging manner, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan sheds new light on McLuhan's goals and the background to his influential writings.
Download or read book An Unnatural Order written by Jim Mason and published by Lantern Books. This book was released on 2004-07 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published by Simon & Schuster in 1993 and then by Continuum in 1998, Jim Mason's An Unnatural Order has become a classic. Now in a new Lantern edition, the book explores, from an anthropological, sociocultural, and holistic perspective, how and why we have cut ourselves off from other animals and the natural world, and the toll this has taken on our consciousness, our ability to steward nature wisely, and the will to control our own tendencies. Jim Mason writes: "My own view is that the primal worldview, updated by a scientific understanding of the living world, offers the best hope for a human spirituality. Life on earth is the miracle, the sacred. The dynamic living world is the creator, the First Being, the sustainer, and the final resting place for all living beings--humans included. We humans evolved with other living beings; their lives informed our lives. They provided models for our existence; they shaped our minds and culture. With dominionism out of the way, we could enjoy a deep sense of kinship with the other animals, which would give us a deep sense of belonging to our living world. "Then, once again, we could feel for this world. We could feel included in the awesome family of living beings. We could feel our continuum with the living world. We could, once again, feel a genuine sense of the sacred in the world."
Download or read book The Great Brain Suck written by Eugene Halton and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More and more information is pumped into our media-saturated world every day, yet Americans seem to know less and less. In a society where who you are is defined by what you buy, and where we prefer to experience reality by watching it on TV, Eugene Halton argues something has clearly gone wrong. Luckily Halton, with scalpel-sharp wit in one hand and the balm of wisdom in the other, is here to operate on the declining body politic. His initial diagnosis is bleak: fast food and too much time spent sitting, whether in our cars or on our couches, are ruining our bodies, while our minds are weakened by the proliferation of electronic devices—TVs, computers, cell phones, iPods, video games—and their alienating effects. If we are losing the battle between autonomy and automation, he asks, how can our culture regain self-sufficiency? Halton finds the answer in the inspiring visions—deeply rooted in American culture—of an organic and more spontaneous life at the heart of the work of master craftsman Wharton Esherick, legendary blues singer Muddy Waters, urban critic Lewis Mumford, and artist Maya Lin, among others. A scathing and original jeremiad against modern materialism, The Great Brain Suck is also a series of epiphanies of a simpler but more profound life.
Download or read book The Future of the World written by Jenny Andersson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-19 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Future of the World is devoted to the intriguing field of study which emerged after World War Two, futurism or futurology. Jenny Andersson explains how futurist scholars and researchers imagined the Cold War and post Cold War world and the tools and methods they would use to influence and change that world. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Some argued it should be a closed sphere of science defined by delimited probabilities. They were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. These different forms of prediction laid very different claims to how accurately futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over what was yet to come. The Future of the World carefully examines these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post war period. Using unexplored archival collections, The Future of the World reconstructs the Cold War networks of futurologists and futurists.
Download or read book The Ascent of Humanity written by Charles Eisenstein and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 577 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible explores the history and potential future of civilization, tracing the converging crises of our age to the illusion of the separate self Our disconnection from one another and the natural world has mislaid the foundations of science, religion, money, technology, economics, medicine, and education as we know them. It has fired our near-pathological pursuit of technological Utopias even as we push ourselves and our planet to the brink of collapse. Fortunately, an Age of Reunion is emerging out of the birth pangs of an earth in crisis. Our journey of separation hasn't been a terrible mistake but an evolutionary process and an adventure in self-discovery. Even in our darkest hour, Eisenstein sees the possibility of a more beautiful world—not through the extension of millennia-old methods of management and control but by fundamentally reimagining ourselves and our systems. We must shift away from our Babelian efforts to build ever-higher towers to heaven and instead turn out attention to creating a new kind of civilization—one designed for beauty rather than height.
Download or read book Remembering the space age Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Conference written by and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Explorations in Ecocriticism written by Paul Lindholdt and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chief innovation of Explorations in Ecocriticism is to push ecological criticism beyond its focus on literary studies to engage with other arts and culture. One chapter closely examines the pictures commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to valorize its big dam projects. Previously, no one has written about the large art collection that toured the nation under the auspices of the Smithsonian in the early 1970s, when the Bureau of Reclamation was under fire and new environmental regulations were becoming law. Another chapter, “An Iconography of Sabotage,” previously published in France as part of a Paris symposium, looks at the pictorial dimension of saboteurs throughout American history, with a special emphasis on the IWW and Earth First! The book draws extensively on the social sciences. Ecology and environment are treated too often as technical topics that go over the heads of lay readers. Many Americans care about air and water quality, the extinction of species, and the unfortunate politicization of science. But they also find the discourse daunting, the details exceedingly complex. By leavening such heavy subjects with current events, Explorations in Ecocriticism makes environmental issues accessible to lay readers and offers routes to sustainability in the United States today.
Download or read book The Final Frontier written by Dale Carter and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stunned by the news of Sputnik in 1957, the American public were to be treated over the next dozen years to the spectacle of an all-out national crusade: the race to beat the Russians to the moon. What few understood at the time - and what has largely been obscured in popular representations of this episode in movies and bestsellers - was the key economic and technical role played by manned space exploration in post-war US capitalist expansion. From Potsdam to Cape Canaveral, the yellow brick road twisted and turned, but its ultimate goal remained clear: the Oz of global American economic and political domination. Taking off from that masterpiece of American fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Dale Carter tells the lurid tale of the postwar boom, through the history of the manned space program. Salvaged from the ashes of Nazi Germany (Pynchon's 'Oven State'), as US officials rounded up the Third Reich's leading V-2 scientists, the American Rocket State embarked on an upward path that would culminate in the epochal voyage of Apollo XI in 1969. Following this path, Carter gives an innovative, brilliant account of American culture and society during the Cold War. He charts the ideological and political significance of a range of phenomena, from films like High Society, Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide to John F. Kennedy's rise to power, from the emergence of a new high-tech economy fueled by the NASA-led transformation of the aerospace industry to the last flight of the space shuttle Challenger. His highly original account of the star-spangled space age sets a new standard for the study of American culture.
Download or read book The Practice of Technology written by Alan Drengson and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1995-10-12 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Practice of Technology explores the narrative themes of modern industrial technology that reveal the underlying agenda of modern culture, which is to redesign the human and natural worlds to conform to the monoculture models of Western society that are embedded in industrial paradigms and practices. The author argues that ecological and social responsibility should be built into the design of new technology practices based on ecosophy (ecological wisdom) that enable us to harmonize with our specific place and ecological context. Root metaphors and mythologies of the West are examined so as to transcend the modern-postmodernist debate that devalues human life and the natural world. Drengson explains how our current problems, such as the environmental crisis, violence, social injustice, dehumanization, and alienation cannot be diagnosed, let alone cured, without understanding the role of technological forces and activities in modern civilization.
Download or read book Eyeing the Red Storm written by Robert M. Dienesch and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2016-04 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1954 the U.S. Air Force launched an ambitious program known as WS-117L to develop the world's first reconnaissance satellite. The goal was to take photographic images from space and relay them back to Earth via radio. Because of technical issues and bureaucratic resistance, however, WS-117L was seriously behind schedule by the time Sputnik orbited Earth in 1957 and was eventually cancelled. The air force began concentrating instead on new programs that eventually launched the first successful U.S. spy satellites. Eyeing the Red Storm examines the birth of space-based reconnaissance not from the perspective of CORONA (the first photo reconnaissance satellite to fly) but rather from that of the WS-117L. Robert M. Dienesch's revised assessment places WS-117L within the larger context of Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency, focusing on the dynamic between military and civilian leadership. Dienesch demonstrates how WS-117L promised Eisenhower not merely military intelligence but also the capacity to manage national security against the Soviet threat. As a fiscal conservative, Eisenhower believed a strong economy was the key to surviving the Cold War and saw satellite reconnaissance as a means to understand the Soviet military challenge more clearly and thus keep American defense spending under control. Although WS-117L never flew, it provided the foundation for all subsequent satellites, breaking theoretical barriers and helping to overcome major technical hurdles, which ensured the success of America's first working reconnaissance satellites and their photographic missions during the Cold War.
Download or read book History of Science in United States written by Marc Rothenberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-12 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia examines all aspects of the history of science in the United States, with a special emphasis placed on the historiography of science in America. It can be used by students, general readers, scientists, or anyone interested in the facts relating to the development of science in the United States. Special emphasis is placed in the history of medicine and technology and on the relationship between science and technology and science and medicine.
Download or read book Modern Technology and the Human Future written by Craig M. Gay and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology has always shaped human life and our understanding of what it means to be human. But does it actually encourage human flourishing? By exploring the doctrine of the incarnation and what it means for our embodiment, Craig Gay raises concerns about the theological implications of modern technologies and movements such as transhumanism, offering an alternative vision to the path of modern technology.
Download or read book Remembering the Space Age written by Steven J. Dick and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Publisher: Proceedings of October 2007 conference, sponsored by the NASA History Division and the National Air and Space Museum, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch in October 1957 and the dawn of the space age.
Download or read book The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty written by Charles S. Cockell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This multi-author text provides in-depth analyses of space ethics and approaches to governance on territories beyond Earth. With insights from a vast background of academic subjects including science, law, philosophy, psychology, and politics it presents a holistic take on the expression of space freedoms and what it might mean for humankind.
