Information Please advances the ongoing critical project of the media scholar Mark Poster: theorizing the social and cultural effects of electronically mediated information. In this book Poster conceptualizes a new relation of humans to information machines, a relation that avoids privileging either the human or the machine but instead focuses on the structures of their interactions. Synthesizing a broad range of critical theory, he explores how texts, images, and sounds are made ...

First Published in 2001. In this collection of essays and interviews, Mark Poster examines theoretical approaches and develops his own position on our information based society. He contends that new communications media disrupt and transfigure the way identities are constituted in cultural exchanges. He looks in detail at several aspects of what might be called "internet culture", including virtuality and democracy. Poster advocates an awareness of the Internet and other new forms of commu...

In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, Vilém Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means.Confirming Flusser’s status as a theori...

Is the Internet the key to a reinvigorated public life? Or will it fragment society by enabling citizens to associate only with like-minded others? Online community has provided social researchers with insights into our evolving social life. As suburbanization and the breakdown of the extended family and neighborhood isolate individuals more and more, the Internet appears as a possible source for reconnection. Are virtual communities 'real' enough to support the kind of personal commitment...

Most of us recognize that organizations are everywhere. You meet them on every street corner in the form of families and shops, study in them, work for them, buy from them, pay taxes to them. But have you given much thought to where they came from, what they are today, and what they might become in the future? How and why do they have so much influence over us, and what influences them? How do they contribute to and detract from the meaningfulness of lives, and how might we improve them so...

Mediatization has emerged as a key concept to reconsider old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture and society. In particular the theory of mediatization has proved fruitful for the analysis of how media spread to, become intertwined with, and influence other social institutions and cultural phenomena like politics, play and religion.This book presents a major contribution to the theoretical understanding of the mediatization of culture and soc...

To understand contemporary times, we must appreciate the extent to which our lives are affected by the cultural and political struggle between "official" narratives and the counternarratives which emerge as oppositional responses. Counternarratives develops a concept of "postmodern counternarratives" as a frame for exploring the politics of media, technology and education within everyday struggles for human identities and loyalties. The authors identify two forms ...

What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular figures, but we do have general intellects whose writing could, if read together, explain our times. Covering topics such as culture, politics, work, technology, and the Anthropocene, each chapter is a concise account of an individual thinker, providing useful context and connections to ...

Praise for the first edition:"This is a great introduction and contribution to the subject. It is unusually wide-ranging, covering the historical development of cultural theory and deftly highlighting key problems that just won′t go away."- Matthew Hills, Cardiff University"To say that the scope of the book′s coverage is wide-ranging would be an under-statement. Few texts come to mind that have attempted such a thorough overview of ...

One of the world’s leading philosophers offers aspiring thinkers his personal trove of mind-stretching thought experiments.Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun.Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful "imagination-extenders and focus-holders" meant to...

Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. At the time of its initial publication...

C. Wright Mills is best remembered for his highly acclaimed work The Sociological Imagination, in which he set forth his views on how social science should be pursued. Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives. The sociological imagination Mills ca...