Download or read book Prefiguring Cyberculture written by Darren Tofts and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Media critics and theorists, philosophers, and historians of science explore the antecedents of such aspects of contemporary technological culture as the Internet, the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, virtual reality, and thecyborg.
Download or read book Prefiguring Cyberculture written by Darren Tofts and published by . This book was released on 2004-10-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature written by Claire Taylor and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of critical essays investigates an emergent and increasingly important field of cultural production in Latin America: cyberliterature and cyberculture in their varying manifestations, including blogs and hypertext narratives, collective novels and e-mags, digital art and short Net-films. Highly innovative in its conception, this book provides the first sustained academic focus on this area of cultural production, and investigates the ways in which cyberliterature and cyberculture in the broadest sense are providing new configurations of subjects, narrative voices, and even political agency, for Latin Americans. The volume is divided into two main sections. The first comprises eight chapters on the broad area of cyberculture and identity formation/preservation including the development of different types of cybercommunities in Latin America. While many of the chapters applaud the creative potential of these new virtual communities, identities and cultural products to create networks across boundaries and offer new contestatory strategies, they also consider whether such phenomena may risk reinforcing existing social inequalities or perpetuate conservatism. The second section comprises six chapters and an afterword that deal with the nature of cyberliterature in all its many forms, from the (cyber)cultural legacies of writers such as Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, to traditional print literature from the region that reflects on the subject of new technology, to weblogs and hypertext and hypermedia fiction proper.
Download or read book Racing Cyberculture written by Christopher L. McGahan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Racing Cyberculture explores new media art that challenges the 'race-blind' myth of cyberspace. The particular cultural workers whose productions are addressed are the performance and installation artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, the UK new media arts collective Mongrel, the conceptual artists and composer Keith Obadike, and the multimedia artist Prema Murthy. The author looks at how works by these artists bring forward questions of racial and cultural identity as they intersect with information technology.
Download or read book How Not to Network a Nation written by Benjamin Peters and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-06-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.
Download or read book Dead Precedents written by Roy Christopher and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how hip-hop created, and came to dominate, the twenty-first century. In Dead Precedents, Roy Christopher traces the story of how hip-hop invented the twenty-first century. Emerging alongside cyberpunk in the 1980s, the hallmarks of hip-hop - allusion, self-reference, the use of new technologies, sampling, the cutting and splicing of language and sound - would come to define the culture of the new millennium. Taking in the groundbreaking work of DJs and MCs, alongside writers like Dick and Gibson, as well as graffiti and DIY culture, Dead Precedents is a counter-culture history of the twentieth century, showcasing hip-hop's role in the creation of the world we now live in.
Download or read book Rave Culture and Religion written by Graham St John and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vast numbers of western youth have attached primary significance to raving and post-rave experiences. This collection of essays explores the socio-cultural and religious dimensions of the rave, 'raving' and rave-derived phenomena.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction written by Rob Latham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-01 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The excitement of possible futures found in science fiction has long fired the human imagination, but the genre's acceptance by academe is relatively recent. No longer marginalized and fighting for respectability, science-fictional works are now studied alongside more traditional art forms. Tracing the capacious genre's birth, evolution, and impact across nations, time periods, subgenres, and media, The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction offers an in-depth, comprehensive assessment of this robust area of scholarly inquiry and considers the future directions that will dictate the terms of the scholarly discourse. The Handbook begins with a focus on questions of genre, covering topics such as critical history, keywords, narrative, the fantastic, and fandom. A subsequent section on media engages with film, television, comics, architecture, music, video games, and more. The genre's role in the convergence of art and everyday life animates a third section, which addresses topics such as UFOs,
Download or read book Beyond Cyberpunk written by Graham J. Murphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of essays that considers the continuing cultural relevance of the cyberpunk genre into the new millennium. Cyberpunk is no longer an emergent phenomenon, but in our digital age of CGI-driven entertainment, the information economy, and globalized capital, we have never more been in need of a fiction capable of engaging with a world shaped by information technology. The essays in explore our cyberpunk realities to soberly reconsider Eighties-era cyberpunk while also mapping contemporary cyberpunk. The contributors seek to move beyond the narrow strictures of cyberpunk as defined in the Eighties and contribute to an ongoing discussion of how to negotiate exchanges among information technologies, global capitalism, and human social existence. The essays offer a variety of perspectives on cyberpunk’s diversity and how this sub-genre remains relevant amidst its transformation from a print fiction genre into a more generalized set of cultural practices, tackling the question of what it is that cyberpunk narratives continue to offer us in those intersections of literary, cultural, theoretical, academic, and technocultural environments.
Download or read book Law and Order in Virtual Worlds Exploring Avatars Their Ownership and Rights written by Adrian, Angela and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2010-05-31 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book examines the legal realities which are emerging from Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) or virtual worlds that demonstrate many of the traits we associate with the Earth world: interpersonal relationships, economic transactions, and organic political institutions"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Virtual Nation written by Gerard Goggin and published by UNSW Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive book on the Australian Internet, Virtual Nation offers a surprising, thought-provoking, and rigorous introduction to a technology that we now can't do without.
Download or read book Monstrous Liminality written by Robert G. Beghetto and published by Ubiquity Press. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the transformation of the figure of the stranger in the literature of the modern age in terms of liminality. As a ‘spectral monster’ that has a paradoxical and liminal relationship to both the sacred and the secular, the figure of the modern stranger has played a role in both adapting and shaping a culturally determined understanding of the self and the other. With the advent of modernity, the stranger, the monster, and the spectre became interconnected. Haunting the edges of reason while also being absorbed into ‘normal’ society, all three, together with the cyborg, manifest the vulnerability of an age that is fearful of the return of the repressed. Yet these figures can also become re-appropriated as positive symbols, able to navigate between the dangerous and chaotic elements that threaten society while serving as precarious and ironic symbols of hope or sustainability. The book shows the explanatory potential of focusing on the resacralizing – in a paradoxical and liminal manner – of traditionally sacred concepts such as ‘messianic’ time and the ‘utopian,’ and the conflicts that emerged as a result of secularized modernity’s denial of its own hybridization. This approach to modern literature shows how the modern stranger, a figure that is both paradoxically immersed and removed from society, deals with the dangers of failing to be re-assimilated into mainstream society and is caught in a fixed or permanent state of liminality, a state that can ultimately lead to boredom, alienation, nihilism, and failure. These ‘monstrous’ aspects of liminality can also be rewarding in that traversing difficult and paradoxical avenues they confront both traditional and contemporary viewpoints, enabling new and fresh perspectives suspended between imagination and reality, past and future, nature and artificial. In many ways, the modern stranger as a figure of literature and the cultural imagination has become more complicated and challenging in the (post)modern contemporary age, both clashing with and encompassing people who go beyond simply the psychological or even spiritual inability to blend in and out of society. However, while the stranger may be altering once again the defining or essentializing the figure could result in the creation of other sets of binaries, and thereby dissolve the purpose and productiveness of both strangeness and liminality. The intention of “Monstrous Liminality” is to trace the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that has characterized modernity itself. This space has consequently altered the makeup of the stranger from something external, into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse this uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age that is struggling to maintain any.
Download or read book Semiotic Bulimia written by Douglas Shoback and published by Smashwords. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Trump’s America, our identities are in constant flux. Fake News, gaslighting, lies, attacks on the Fourth Estate, all cogs of an empty signifier held by the Brand in 21st-century Capitalism. Meaning is in constant fluctuation, a truth becoming a lie in just a second. Our identities changing daily by the bombardment of 24-hour news cycles and the constant flow of information from our mobile devices. What is true and what is false anymore? In the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, we were certain about things. We knew what was true and what was false, or so we thought. We bought physical products that remained the same every day. Fireball Mountain would always be impossible to play. Nintendo and Sega gave us mascots we could rely on. Then something happened. The world tilted a bit. And things became strange and full of multiple meanings. The internet and the iPhone gave the masses access to all the knowledge of humanity. We thought we’d become enlightened. We thought with this access to all the information ever recorded throughout human history, people would make intelligent choices. Opinions would be critically examined. The marketplace of ideas would be flooded. But no. We got Facebook. We got Twitter. We got 4Chan and 8Chan and trolls and misinformation and augmented reality—so real, yet not. We became sponges for lies. And our identities changed. The world’s meaning changed. 2016 happened. And we needed guidance from the past. And so, we looked to our authors who try to predict the future. This is what happened: Science Fiction (SF) author William Gibson has never been one to shy away from the problems of semiology in late-Capitalism and post-modernism. His novels deal extensively with the functions of the technological apparatus in relation to human bodies. Bodies in Gibson novels are depicted as flesh machines, a fusing of biological and mechanical parts creating something not quite human but not without humanity: a cyborg. With Gibson, The natural world becomes attached to and defined by the gray starkness of technology. In turn, these worlds are controlled by omnipotent corporations and hyper-Capitalistic enterprises, suspended between the identifiable “natural” human and the controlled and created identity of the machine. Because the “natural” human identity within Gibson novels is intertwined with the created technological identity, these novels inherently focus upon a crisis of representation in a world with no definitive separation between technological meaning and “natural” meaning—Gibson novels focus upon the crisis of meaning within a world overwhelmed by an innumerable amount of signs. In the 21st century, where the sign has become the main method of establishing an identity, it is increasingly important to see where these signs are created and, more importantly, where the signification comes from. And in 2019, the sign and signifier both come from late Capitalism corporations. No longer is a product the focus of the Corporation, but the lifestyle of those who consume the product. Just like a William Gibson model, those of us living in the second decade of the 21st century have become cyborgs, branded by Corporations, our lifestyles determined by the branded ideologies created by these Corporations. Our identities reliant upon modern Capitalist methods of branding. We are cyborgs of the 21st century, both through technological enhancement and in identity formation. Our bodies the playground of the sign, the signifier controlled by the company or the CEO. Or even information itself.
Download or read book The Ethics of Cultural Studies written by Joanna Zylinska and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ethical questions feature prominently on today's cultural andpolitical agendas. The Ethics of Cultural Studies presents an ethicalmanifesto for Cultural Studies, an exploration of its current ethicaland political concerns, and of its future challenges.The book is concerned with ethics in the material world, and drawson examples as diverse as cloning and genetics, asylum andimmigration, experiments in plastic surgery and in electronic anddigital art, memories of the Holocaust, September 11th, and mediarepresentations of violence and crime.The Ethics of Cultural Studies is a groundbreaking intervention thatsets the debate on ethics in cultural study, and offers an invaluablesource of ideas for students of contemporary culture.
Download or read book Digital Performance written by Steve Dixon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts. The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution of these practices, presents detailed accounts of key practitioners and performances, and analyzes the theoretical, artistic, and technological contexts of this form of new media art. Dixon finds precursors to today's digital performances in past forms of theatrical technology that range from the deus ex machina of classical Greek drama to Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk (concept of the total artwork), and draws parallels between contemporary work and the theories and practices of Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Futurism, and multimedia pioneers of the twentieth century. For a theoretical perspective on digital performance, Dixon draws on the work of Philip Auslander, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and others. To document and analyze contemporary digital performance practice, Dixon considers changes in the representation of the body, space, and time. He considers virtual bodies, avatars, and digital doubles, as well as performances by artists including Stelarc, Robert Lepage, Merce Cunningham, Laurie Anderson, Blast Theory, and Eduardo Kac. He investigates new media's novel approaches to creating theatrical spectacle, including virtual reality and robot performance work, telematic performances in which remote locations are linked in real time, Webcams, and online drama communities, and considers the "extratemporal" illusion created by some technological theater works. Finally, he defines categories of interactivity, from navigational to participatory and collaborative. Dixon challenges dominant theoretical approaches to digital performance—including what he calls postmodernism's denial of the new—and offers a series of boldly original arguments in their place.
Download or read book New Media and the Nation in Malaysia written by Susan Leong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the four decades or so since its invention, the internet has become pivotal to how many societies function, influencing how individual citizens interact with and respond to their governments. Within Southeast Asia, while most governments subscribe to the belief that new media technological advancement improves their nation’s socio-economic conditions, they also worry about its cultural and political effects. This book examines how this set of dynamics operates through its study of new media in contemporary Malaysian society. Using the social imaginary framework and adopting a socio-historical approach, the book explains the varied understandings of new media as a continuing process wherein individuals and their societies operate in tandem to create, negotiate and enact the meaning ascribed to concepts and ideas. In doing so, it also highlights the importance of non-users to national technological policies. Through its examination of the ideation and development of Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor mega project to-date and reference to the seminal socio-political events of 2007-2012 including the 2008 General Elections, Bersih and Hindraf rallies, this book provides a clear explanation for new media’s prominence in the multi-ethnic and majority Islamic society of Malaysia today. It is of interest to academics working in the field of Media and Internet Studies and Southeast Asian Politics.
Download or read book Monstrous Textualities written by Anya Heise-von der Lippe and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monstrous textuality emerges when Gothic narratives like Frankenstein reflect the monstrous in their narrative structure to create narratives of resistance. It allows writers to meta-narratively reflect their own poetics and textual production, and reclaim authority over their work under circumstances of systemic cultural oppression and Othering. This book traces the representation of other Others through Black feminist hauntology in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Love (2003); it explores fat freak embodiment as a feminist resistance strategy in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976); and it reads Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13) and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) within a framework of critical posthumanist and cyborg theory. The result is a comprehensive argument about how these texts can be read within a framework of critical posthumanist questioning of knowledge production, and of epistemological exploration, beyond the exclusionary humanist paradigm.
