Jean-François Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979–) [IT, EN, BR-PT, CZ, GR, LV, CR]
Filed under book | Tags: · epistemology, grand narratives, knowledge, machine, mass media, philosophy, postmodern, postmodernism, science, technology
“The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge is a short but influential philosophy book by Jean-François Lyotard in which he analyzes the epistemology of postmodern culture as the end of ‘grand narratives’ or metanarratives, which he considers a quintessential feature of modernity. The book was originally written as a report to the Conseil des universités du Québec. The book introduced the term ‘postmodernism’, which was previously only used by art critics, in philosophy with the following quotation: “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives”.
Among the metanarratives are reductionism and teleological notions of human history such as those of the Enlightenment and Marxism. These have become untenable, according to Lyotard, by technological progress in the areas of communication, mass media and computer science. Techniques such as artificial intelligence and machine translation show a shift to linguistic and symbolic production as central elements of the postindustrial economy and the related postmodern culture, which had risen at the end of the 1950s after the reconstruction of western Europe. The result is a plurality of language-games (a term coined by Wittgenstein), without any overarching structure. Modern science thus destroys its own metanarrative.
In the book, Lyotard professes a preference for this plurality of small narratives that compete with each other, replacing the totalitarianism of grand narratives. For this reason, The Postmodern Condidtion has been criticized as an excuse for unbounded relativism. However, Lyotard suggests that there is an objective truth, but because of the limited amount of knowledge that humans can understand, humans will never know this objective truth. In other words, Lyotard advocates that there is no certainty of ideas, but rather there are better or worse ways to interpret things.
The Postmodern Condition was written as a report on the influence of technology on the notion of knowledge in exact sciences, commissioned by the Québec government. Lyotard later admitted that he had a ‘less than limited’ knowledge of the science he was to write about, and to compensate for this knowledge, he ‘made stories up’ and referred to a number of books that he hadn’t actually read. In retrospect, he called it ‘a parody’ and ‘simply the worst of all my books’. Despite this, and much to Lyotard’s regret, it came to be seen as his most important piece of writing.”
First published as the report Les problèmes du savoir dans les sociétés industrielles les plus développées, 1979; consequently as La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Les Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1979.
English edition
Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
Foreword by Fredric Jameson
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1984
Theory and History of Literature series, Volume 10
ISBN 0719014506
135 pages
La condizione postmoderna (Italian, trans. Carlo Formenti, 1981/2014, 5 MB, added on 2015-5-4)
The Postmodern Condition (English, trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi, 1984, updated on 2012-7-24)
O pós-moderno (Brazilian Portuguese, trans. Ricardo Correa Barbosa, 1986/1988, 8 MB, added on 2015-5-4)
O postmodernismu (Czech, trans. Jiří Pechar, 1993, added on 2015-5-4)
Η μεταμοντέρνα κατάσταση (Greek, trans. Κωστής Παπαγιώργης, 1993, added on 2015-5-4)
Postmodernus būvis (Lithuanian, trans. Marius Daškus, 1993, 4 MB, added on 2015-5-4)
Postmoderno stanje: izvještaj o znanju (Croatian, trans. Tatiana Tadić, 2005, added on 2017-7-27)
David Thorburn, Henry Jenkins (eds.): Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, hypertext, mass media, media history, museum, phonograph, television
The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors’ introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and “the virtual window.”
The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.
Publisher MIT Press, 2004
Media in Transition series
ISBN 0262701073, 9780262701075
416 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)
Comment (0)Iva Šotnarová: Mediální obraz českých hackerů (2009) [Czech]
Filed under thesis | Tags: · cyberspace, czech republic, hacker culture, hacking, mass media
Práce popisuje hackerské příběhy a legendy, které se objevily ve vybraných médiích v České a Slovenské republice v letech 1989 – 2009. Přináší obraz doby, ve které se příběhy odehrály a kontext, který toto dění ovlivnil. Pomocí analýzy diskurzu popisuje změnu vnímání hackerů médii a zprostředkovaně veřejností. Všímá si posunu významu od původního označení hackera jako počítačového odborníka k novému pojetí, spojenému s nelegální činností a kriminalitou.
Klíčová slova: hacking, hacker, subkultura, internetová kriminalita, kyberprostor, mediální obraz, diskurz, analýza diskurzu
Bakalářská práce
Masarykova univerzita, Fakulta sociálních studií, Mediální a komunikační studia/Mediální studia a žurnalistika
Vedoucí práce: Mgr. Jakub Macek
Brno: FSS MU, 2009