Inhuman Networks

Inhuman Networks
Author: Grant Bollmer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2016-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 150131615X

"Examines how "the human" is produced in relation to technological changes, foregrounding the necessity of theoretical and archaeological perspectives for understanding contemporary media culture"--

Sustainability: Post-sustainability

Sustainability: Post-sustainability
Author: M. R. Redclift
Publisher: Taylor & Francis US
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2005-09-22
Genre: Social sciences
ISBN: 9780415340380

This four-volume set introduces the reader to 'sustainability' as a concept, a contested idea and a political goal, and brings together a range of articles and published papers that have influenced the course of thinking in social science.

Undoing Networks

Undoing Networks
Author: Tero Karppi
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1452959749

Exploring and conceptualizing practices, technologies, and politics of disconnecting How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: “digital detox” is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life. Self-help books advocate “digital minimalism” to recover authentic experiences of the offline. Artists envision a world without the internet. Activists mobilize against the expansion of the 5G network. If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores nonusage and the “right to disconnect” from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism.

The Information Society Reader

The Information Society Reader
Author: with Raimo Blom
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000082768

There has been much debate over the idea of 'the information society'. Some thinkers have argued that information is becoming the key ordering principle in society, whereas others suggest that the rise of information has been overstated. Whatever the case, it cannot be denied that 'informization' has produced vast changes in advanced societies. The Information Society Reader pulls together the main contributions to this debate from some of the key figures in the field. Major topics addressed include: * post-industrialism * surveillance * transformations * the network society * democracy * digital divisions * virtual relations. With a comprehensive introduction from Frank Webster, selections from Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault and Christopher Lasch amongst others, and section introductions contextualising the readings, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and academics studying contemporary society and all things cyber.

Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures

Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures
Author: Edward King
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2022-04-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 135016917X

The tale of twins being reunited after a long separation is a trope that has been endlessly repeated and reworked across different cultures and throughout history, with each moment adapting the twin plot to address its current cultural tensions. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. As King demonstrates, twins tell us about the changing forms of connectivity and power in contemporary culture and what new conceptions of the human they present us with. Taking account of a broad range of literary, cultural and scientific practices, Entwined Being probes discussions surrounding twins such as: - The way in which they appear in behavioral genetics as a way of identifying inherited predispositions to social media - How their faces interrupt biometric interfaces such as facial recognition software and undermine advances in neo-liberal surveillance systems - How they represent the uncanny and the weird in the horror genre and how this questions ideologies of communications media and the connectivity it enables - Their association with telepathy and cybernetics in science fiction - Their construction as models for entangled being in ecological thought Drawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.

Inhuman Networks

Inhuman Networks
Author: Grant Bollmer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2016-08-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501316168

Social media's connectivity is often thought to be a manifestation of human nature buried until now, revealed only through the diverse technologies of the participatory internet. Rather than embrace this view, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection argues that the human nature revealed by social media imagines network technology and data as models for behavior online. Covering a wide range of historical and interdisciplinary subjects, Grant Bollmer examines the emergence of “the network” as a model for relation in the 1700s and 1800s and follows it through marginal, often forgotten articulations of technology, biology, economics, and the social. From this history, Bollmer examines contemporary controversies surrounding social media, extending out to the influence of network models on issues of critical theory, politics, popular science, and neoliberalism. By moving through the past and present of network media, Inhuman Networks demonstrates how contemporary network culture unintentionally repeats debates over the limits of Western modernity to provide an idealized future where “the human” is interchangeable with abstract, flowing data connected through well-managed, distributed networks.

Sociology Beyond Societies

Sociology Beyond Societies
Author: John Urry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2012-11-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134655444

In this ground-breaking contribution to social theory, John Urry argues that the traditional basis of sociology - the study of society - is outmoded in an increasingly borderless world. If sociology is to make a pertinent contribution to the post societal era it must forget the social rigidities of the pre-global order and, instead, switch its focus to the study of both physical and virtual movement. In considering this sociology of mobilities, the book concerns itself with the travels of people, ideas, images, messages, waste products and money across international borders, and the implications these mobilities have to our experiences of time, space, dwelling and citizenship. Sociology Beyond Society extends recent debate about globalisation both by providing an analysis of how mobilities reconstitute social life in uneven and complex ways, and by arguing for the significance of objects, senses, and time and space in the theorising of contemporary life. This book will be essential reading for undergraduates and graduates studying sociology and cultural geography.

Literary Culture in a World Transformed

Literary Culture in a World Transformed
Author: William Paulson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1501729349

Literary studies are in danger of being left behind in the twenty-first century. Print culture risks becoming a thing of the past in the multimedia age; meanwhile, human life and society are undergoing rapid changes as a result of new technologies, the intensification of global capitalism, and the effects of human actions on the environment.In this transformed world, William Paulson argues for a radical renewal of literary studies. Modern literary culture has defined itself, in opposition to science, politics, and commerce, as a protected sphere of democratic and free inquiry, but today that autonomy may lead to isolation from the real dynamics of cultural and global change. Paulson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the need for literary studies to embrace both the unfashionable literary past and the technologically saturated future, and to train not a countersociety of cultural critics but citizens of the world who can communicate the irreducible strangeness and multiplicity of literature to a society on hyperdrive. His series of concrete proposals, ranging from a closer connection between literature and everyday language to the restructuring of undergraduate and graduate education, will immeasurably enrich current discussions of the humanities' role in the life of the world.