Roger Silverstone: Television And Everyday Life (1994)

Television and Everyday Life explores the enigma of television, and how it has insinuated its way so profoundly and intimately into our daily lives. The book unravels television’s emotional, cognitive, spatial, temporal and political significance.

Drawing from a broad range of literature–from psychoanalysis to sociology, from geography to cultural studies–Roger Silverstone constructs a theory which places television in a central position within the various realities and discourses which construct everyday life. The medium emerges from these arguments as a fascinating, complex phenomenon of contradictions, yet the book explodes many of the myths surrounding what has been called “The Love Machine”.

Television and Everyday Life presents a radical new approach to the medium, one that both challenges closely-held wisdoms, and offers a compellingly original view of where telvision sits in everyday life.

Publisher Routledge, 1994
ISBN 0415016479, 9780415016476
Length 204 pages

Keywords and phrases
soap opera, ontological security, television, moral economy, Silverstone, mass media, suburbanisation, situation comedy, Frankfurt School, post-modern, phenomenology, commodification, Marilyn Strathern, polysemy, Radway, sit-coms, David Morley, Daniel Miller, object relations theory, privatisation

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Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, Eric Ketelaar (eds.): Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media (2006)

“Sign Here! features a number of articles from different fields, reaching from cultural and media studies to reaching from cultural and media studies to literature, film and art, and from philosophy and information studies to law and archival studies. Questions addressed in this book are: Will handwriting disappear in the age of new (digital) media? What happens to important cultural and legal concepts, such as original, copy, authenticity, reproducibility, uniqueness, and iterability? Where is the writing hand to be located if handwriting is performed not immediately ‘by hand’ but when it is (re)mediated by electronic or artistic media?”

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2006
Transformations in Art and Culture series
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 License
ISBN 9053568166, 9789053568163
247 pages

Keywords and phrases
weblogs, digital signature, Saul Bass, electronic signature, Martin Scorsese, Hurufi, Hitler diaries, Anne Frank House, tattoo, Arnold Dreyblatt, calligraphic, identity theft, Shirin Neshat, Eecke, handwriting, blogging, Jacques Derrida, Adolf Hitler, mise en abyme, digital media

Publisher
OAPEN

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Ollivier Dyens: Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man. Technology Takes Over (2001)

For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious, neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs, clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information symbionts.

Ollivier Dyens’s Metal and Flesh is about two closely related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century—which will be remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and transformed by technology and culture—Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our lives.

Translated by Ollivier Dyens, Evan J. Bibbee
Publisher MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 0262042002, 9780262042000
Length 120 pages

Keywords and phrases
cyberpunk, cyborg, Robocop, Pamela Anderson, Metaman, ontology, Gregor Samsa, doublethink, Kevin Kelly, a-life, William Gibson, Cruel Miracles, Bruce Sterling, artificial intelligence, Joel Slayton, Reprogenetics, semiotic, extraterrestrial, Richard Dawkins, Bodies without Organs

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