D. E. Wittkower (ed.): Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind? (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · facebook, internet, journalism, media activism, networks, philosophy, privacy, twitter, web 2.0
Facebook and Philosophy is an entertaining, multi-faceted exploration of what Facebook means for us and for our relationships. With discussions ranging from the nature of friendship and its relationship to “friending,” to the (debatable) efficacy of “online activism,” this book is the most extensive and systematic attempt to understand Facebook yet. And with plenty of new perspectives on Twitter and Web 2.0 along the way, this fun, thought-provoking book is a serious and significant contribution for anyone working with social media, whether in academia, journalism, public relations, activism, or business. Exploring far-reaching questions — Can our interactions on Facebook help us care about each other more? Does Facebook signal the death of privacy, or (perhaps worse yet) the death of our desire for privacy? — Facebook and Philosophy is vital reading for anyone involved in social networks today.
Publisher Open Court, 2010
Volume 50 of Popular Culture and Philosophy
ISBN 0812696751, 9780812696752
288 pages
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Comments (2)Roy Ascott (ed.): Art, Technologies, Consciousness: mind@large (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, art and technology, artificial life, computer music, consciousness, interactivity, metaphysics, music, perception, performance, quantum mechanics, robotics, semiotics, synaesthesia, technoetics, technology, telematics
Within a technological context, this volume addresses contemporary theories of consciousness, subjective experience, the creation of meaning and emotion, and relationships between cognition and location. Its focus is both on and beyond the digital culture, seeking to assimilate new ideas emanating from the physical sciences as well as embracing spiritual and artistic aspects of human experience.
Developing on the studies published in Roy Ascott’s successful Reframing Consciousness, the book documents the very latest work from those connected with the internationally acclaimed CAiiA-STAR centre and its conferences. Their artistic and theoretical research in new media and art includes aspects of:
• artificial life
• robotics
• technoetics
• performance
• computer music
• intelligent architecture
• telematic art
With profound insights for those in fields of Art, Media and Design – both academics and professionals — this book will also provide new ideas for software designers working on material to be used by the arts community.
Publisher Intellect Books, 2000
ISBN 1841500410, 9781841500416
204 pages
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Comment (1)Jodi Dean: Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, blogosphere, capitalism, communicative capitalism, critical theory, facebook, floss, free software, media theory, neoliberalism, psychoanalysis, technology, utopia, web 2.0, youtube
Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.
Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.
In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchanges–from blog posts to text messages–have widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.
Publisher Polity, 2010
ISBN 0745649696, 9780745649696
140 pages
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Comment (0)Surveillance and Society journal, Vol. 1, 6-8 (2002, 2009-2011)
Filed under journal | Tags: · cctv, control society, media art, society, sousveillance, surveillance
Surveillance & Society is the premier peer-reviewed free access electronic journal of surveillance studies.
Surveillance & Society exists to publish innovative and transdisciplinary work on surveillance; encourage understanding of approaches to surveillance in different academic disciplines; promote understanding of surveillance in wider society; encourage policy and political debate about surveillance.
Vol 8, No 3 (2011): Marketing, Consumption and Surveillance. Edited by Jason Pridmore and Detlev Zwick
Vol 8, No 2 (2010): Surveillance and Empowerment
Vol 8, No 1 (2010): Open Issue
Vol 7, No 3/4 (2010): Surveillance, Children and Childhood
Vol 7, No 2 (2010): Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art
Vol 7, No 1 (2009): Open Issue
Vol 6, No 4 (2009): Gender, Sexuality and Surveillance
Vol 6, No 3 (2009): Surveillance and Resistance. Guest Editors: Laura Huey and Luis A. Fernandez
Vol 6, No 2 (2009): Health, Medicine and Surveillance
Vol 6, No 1 (2009): Relaunch Issue: Revisiting Video Surveillance
(2002) Launch Issue
Editorial team: David Murakami Wood (Managing Editor), Sarah Cheung (Editorial Assistant), Kevin D Haggerty (Book Review Editor), Nils Zurawski (Web Manager)
Published by Surveillance Studies Network
ISSN 1477-7487
Trebor Scholz, Laura Y. Liu: Situated Technologies Pamphlet 7: From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, internet, labour, life, network culture, technology, urbanism, web 2.0, work
The authors reflect on the relationship between labor and technology in urban space where communication, attention, and physical movement generate financial value for a small number of private stakeholders. Online and off, Internet users are increasingly wielded as a resource for economic amelioration, for private capture, and the channels of communication are becoming increasingly inscrutable. Liu and Scholz ask: How does the intertwining of labor and play complicate our understanding of exploitation?
Publisher: The Architectural League of New York, Fall 2010
Series Editors: Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, Mark Shepard
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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William Aspray: John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing (1990)
Filed under book | Tags: · comput, computing, history of computing, history of technology, technology
John von Neumann (1903-1957) was unquestionably one of the most brilliant scientists of the twentieth century. He made major contributions to quantum mechanics and mathematical physics and in 1943 began a new and all-too-short career in computer science. William Aspray provides the first broad and detailed account of von Neumann’s many different contributions to computing. These, Aspray reveals, extended far beyond his well-known work in the design and construction of computer systems to include important scientific applications, the revival of numerical analysis, and the creation of a theory of computing.
Aspray points out that from the beginning von Neumann took a wider and more theoretical view than other computer pioneers. In the now famous EDVAC report of 1945, von Neumann clearly stated the idea of a stored program that resides in the computer’s memory along with the data it was to operate on. This stored program computer was described in terms of idealized neurons, highlighting the analogy between the digital computer and the human brain. Aspray describes von Neumann’s development during the next decade, and almost entirely alone, of a theory of complicated information processing systems, or automata, and the introduction of themes such as learning, reliability of systems with unreliable components, self-replication, and the importance of memory and storage capacity in biological nervous systems; many of these themes remain at the heart of current investigations in parallel or neurocomputing.
Aspray allows the record to speak for itself. He unravels an intricate sequence of stories generated by von Neumann’s work and brings into focus the interplay of personalities centered about von Neumann. He documents the complex interactions of science, the military, and business and shows how progress in applied mathematics was intertwined with that in computers.
Publisher MIT Press, 1990
History of Computing series
ISBN 0262011212, 9780262011211
376 pages
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Comment (1)George Saliba: Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · astronomy, history of science, renaissance, science
The Islamic scientific tradition has been described many times in accounts of Islamic civilization and general histories of science, with most authors tracing its beginnings to the appropriation of ideas from other ancient civilizations—the Greeks in particular. In this thought-provoking and original book, George Saliba argues that, contrary to the generally accepted view, the foundations of Islamic scientific thought were laid well before Greek sources were formally translated into Arabic in the ninth century. Drawing on an account by the tenth-century intellectual historian Ibn al-Nadīm that is ignored by most modern scholars, Saliba suggests that early translations from mainly Persian and Greek sources outlining elementary scientific ideas for the use of government departments were the impetus for the development of the Islamic scientific tradition. He argues further that there was an organic relationship between the Islamic scientific thought that developed in later centuries and the science that came into being in Europe during the Renaissance.
Saliba outlines the conventional accounts of Islamic science, then discusses their shortcomings and proposes an alternate narrative. Using astronomy as a template for understanding the progress of science in Islamic civilization, Saliba demonstrates the originality of Islamic scientific thought. He details the innovations (including new mathematical tools) made by the Islamic astronomers from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, and offers evidence that Copernicus could have known of and drawn on their work. Rather than viewing the rise and fall of Islamic science from the often-narrated perspectives of politics and religion, Saliba focuses on the scientific production itself and the complex social, economic, and intellectual conditions that made it possible.
Publisher MIT Press, 2007
Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology series
ISBN 0262195577, 9780262195577
315 pages
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