Download or read book The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture written by Richard Stivers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture proposes that modern technology seriously influences every aspect of culture and personality. Technology shapes our beliefs and values and even how we think of ourselves. It affects religion, morality, education, language, communication, and sexual identity. Every institution, every organization, is brought under its purview. This book attempts to awaken the reader to the destructive side of modern technology that exists side-by-side with its constructive side. What modern technology is destroying, however, is the very meaning of being human. The essay “The Media Creates Us in Its Image” makes this case most dramatically. The book asks the reader the following question: Is what you have gained from the use of modern technology more important than what you have lost? How do we once again bring technology under our control in the face of its inexorable “progress”?
Download or read book The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture written by Richard Stivers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Media Creates Us in Its Image and Other Essays on Technology and Culture proposes that modern technology seriously influences every aspect of culture and personality. Technology shapes our beliefs and values and even how we think of ourselves. It affects religion, morality, education, language, communication, and sexual identity. Every institution, every organization, is brought under its purview. This book attempts to awaken the reader to the destructive side of modern technology that exists side-by-side with its constructive side. What modern technology is destroying, however, is the very meaning of being human. The essay "The Media Creates Us in Its Image" makes this case most dramatically. The book asks the reader the following question: Is what you have gained from the use of modern technology more important than what you have lost? How do we once again bring technology under our control in the face of its inexorable "progress"?
Download or read book Spreadable Media written by Henry Jenkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Spreadable Media" maps fundamental changes taking place in the contemporary media environment, a space where corporations no longer tightly control media distribution. This book challenges some of the prevailing frameworks used to describe contemporary media.
Download or read book Image written by Mark C. Taylor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion, explore the modern power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Modern life is steeped in images, image-making, and attempts to control the world through vision. Mastery of images has been advanced by technologies that expand and reshape vision and enable us to create, store, transmit, and display images. The three essays in Image, written by leading philosophers of religion Mark C. Taylor, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Thomas A. Carlson, explore the power of the visual at the intersection of the human and the technological. Building on Heidegger’s notion that modern humanity aims to master the world by picturing or representing the real, they investigate the contemporary culture of the image in its philosophical, religious, economic, political, imperial, and military dimensions, challenging the abstraction, anonymity, and dangerous disconnection of contemporary images. Taylor traces a history of capitalism, focusing on its lack of humility, particularly in the face of mortality, and he considers art as a possible way to reconnect us to the earth. Through a genealogy of iconic views from space, Rubenstein exposes the delusions of conquest associated with extraterrestrial travel. Starting with the pressing issues of surveillance capitalism and facial recognition technology, Carlson extends Heidegger’s analysis through a meditation on the telematic elimination of the individual brought about by totalizing technologies. Together, these essays call for a consideration of how we can act responsibly toward the past in a way that preserves the earth for future generations. Attending to the fragility of material things and to our own mortality, they propose new practices of imagination grounded in love and humility.
Download or read book The Culture of Cynicism written by Richard Stivers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-06-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Stivers received an Earhart Foundation research fellowship to write this wide-ranging and thought-provoking book on American morality. The book places American morality in its historical and cultural context. His research uncovered an ersatz morality that has supplanted traditional Judaic-Christian and humanistic moralities, which placed some limitations on the exercises of power. It consists of technical and bureaucratic rules, public opinion and peer group norms, and visual images in the media. Technical and bureaucratic rules are technology's power to organize society. Public opinion and peer group norms work to transform the normal into the moral, and visual images in the media make tangible what is normal and what is possible, both of which follow the lead of technology. This technological morality is exclusively about unleashing power and has no moral purposes: it is solely about efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, he discusses the social and psychological costs of living without a common morality.
Download or read book Between Reason and Experience written by Andrew Feenberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-04-09 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading philosopher of technology calls for the democratic coordination of technical rationality with everyday experience. The technologies, markets, and administrations of today's knowledge society are in crisis. We face recurring disasters in every domain: climate change, energy shortages, economic meltdown. The system is broken, despite everything the technocrats claim to know about science, technology, and economics. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that today powerful technologies have unforeseen effects that disrupt everyday life; the new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience, and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil. In Between Reason and Experience, leading philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg makes a case for the interdependence of reason—scientific knowledge, technical rationality—and experience. Feenberg examines different aspects of the tangled relationship between technology and society from the perspective of critical theory of technology, an approach he has pioneered over the past twenty years. Feenberg points to two examples of democratic interventions into technology: the Internet (in which user initiative has influenced design) and the environmental movement (in which science coordinates with protest and policy). He examines methodological applications of critical theory of technology to the case of the French Minitel computing network and to the relationship between national culture and technology in Japan. Finally, Feenberg considers the philosophies of technology of Heidegger, Habermas, Latour, and Marcuse. The gradual extension of democracy into the technical sphere, Feenberg argues, is one of the great political transformations of our time.
Download or read book Television and American Culture written by Jason Mittell and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring television at once as a technological medium, an economic system, a facet of democracy, and a part of everyday life, this landmark text uses numerous sidebars and case studies to demonstrate the past, immediate, and far-reaching effects of American culture on television--and television's influence on American culture. Arranged topically, the book provides a broad historical overview of television while also honing in on such finer points as the formal attributes of its various genres and its role in gender and racial identity formation.
Download or read book Culture Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films written by Carl Silvio and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-06-09 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Released in May 1977, the original Star Wars movie inaugurated the age of the movie blockbuster. It also redefined the use of cinematic special effects, creating a new textual universe that now stretches through three decades, two trilogies and generations of fascinated viewers. The body of critical analysis that has developed from this epic focuses primarily on the Star Wars universe as a contemporary myth. However, like any fiction, it must also be viewed—and consequently analyzed—as a product of the culture which created it. The essays in this book analyze the Star Wars trilogies as a culturally and historically specific phenomenon. Moving away from the traditional myth-based criticism of the films, the essayists employ a cultural studies model to examine how this phenomenon intersects with social formations such as economics, technology, race and gender. Critical approaches are varied and include political and economic analysis informed by feminism, contemporary race theory, Marxism, new media studies and post-humanism. Among the topics covered are the connections between the trilogies and our own cultural landscape; the problematic issues of race and gender; and the thematic implications of Lucas’ presentation of technology. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book Convergence Culture written by Henry Jenkins and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What the future fortunes of [Gramsci’s] writings will be, we cannot know. However, his permanence is already sufficiently sure, and justifies the historical study of his international reception. The present collection of studies is an indispensable foundation for this.” —Eric Hobsbawm, from the preface Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world's greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci’s masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary. Gramscian terms such as “civil society” and “hegemony” are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci’s writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of “grand explanatory schemes,” the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: “Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived in by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society.” The rigor of Santucci’s examination of Gramsci’s life and work matches that of the seminal thought of the master himself. Readers will be enlightened and inspired by every page.
Download or read book Religion in America Today written by Richard Stivers and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion in American Today describes how sacred powers and secular religions have overtaken and infiltrated Christianity. Secular religion is now dominant in America: It assumes the forms of personal religion and political religion. Christianity makes its living within the confines of these secular religions. The point of the book is to identify the idolatry in what now passes for Christianity. Technology and the political state are socially constructed as sacred powers. As such they are idols. In its slumber Christianity embraces technology and the political state to the point of becoming subordinate to them. Concurrently technology and the political state give rise to the dominant secular religions. Personal religion acts as a consumer service, a psychological technique, to acquire health and happiness in this life. Political religion is a consequence of politics replacing religion in the quest for collective meaning in a technological society. Political movements become religious revivals and political parties, churches. This book is an attempt to awaken Christians to the idols that beckon.
Download or read book Understanding Media written by Marshall McLuhan and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-09-04 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Covert Presence and Other Essays on Politics and Culture written by Alice Guillermo and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Turning The Century written by Carol Stabile and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The essays in Turning the Century make a significant contribution to our understanding of America's love affairs with novelty and the mass media. The essays also show that neither the current communications revolution nor the response to it is unprecedented. Through this book, Carol Stabile provides a historical context within which scholars and students of American culture can interpret and understand end-of-the-millennium-fever --particularly, the claims of politicians, pundits, and even cultural studies scholars who maintain that recent information technology innovations make the present moment unique. Contemporary studies of mass media and popular culture reflect a similar emphasis on what is new, distinct, and therefore specific to contemporary culture. Claims of millennial transformation, however, are only possible insofar as the history of mass media can be forgotten or ignored. In Turning the Century, Carol Stabile analyzes those hidden, and now all but forgotten, conditions and relations of production that continue to shape and inform contemporary culture."--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Screen written by Jessica Helfand and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2001-11 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designer and critic Jessica Helfand has emerged as a leading voice of a new generation of designers. Her essays--at once pithy, polemical, and precise--appear in places as diverse as Eye, Print, ID, The New Republic, and the LA Times. The essays collected here decode the technologies, trends, themes, and personalities that define design today, especially the new media, and provide a road map of things to come. Her first two chapbooks--Paul Rand: American Modernist and Six (+2) Essays on Design and New Media--became instant classics. This new compilation brings together essays from the earlier publications along with more than twenty others on a variety of topics including avatars, the cult of the scratchy, television, sex on the screen, and more. Designers, students, educators, visual literati, and everyone looking for an entertaining and insightful guide to the world of design today will not find a better or more approachable book on the subject.
Download or read book Television after TV written by Jan Olsson and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last ten years, television has reinvented itself in numerous ways. The demise of the U.S. three-network system, the rise of multi-channel cable and global satellite delivery, changes in regulation policies and ownership rules, technological innovations in screen design, and the development of digital systems like TiVo have combined to transform the practice we call watching tv. If tv refers to the technologies, program forms, government policies, and practices of looking associated with the medium in its classic public service and three-network age, it appears that we are now entering a new phase of television. Exploring these changes, the essays in this collection consider the future of television in the United States and Europe and the scholarship and activism focused on it. With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, television’s changing role in public places and at home, the Internet’s use as a means of social activism, and television’s role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for television’s past, present, and future. Contributors. William Boddy, Charlotte Brunsdon, John T. Caldwell, Michael Curtin, Julie D’Acci, Anna Everett, Jostein Gripsrud, John Hartley, Anna McCarthy, David Morley, Jan Olsson, Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Lisa Parks, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, William Uricchio
Download or read book The Digital Dialectic written by Peter Lunenfeld and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How our visual and intellectual cultures are changed by the new interaction-based media and technologies.
