Manuel Castells: The Informational City: Economic Restructuring and Urban Development (1991)

The cities and the regions of the world are being transformed under the combined impact of a restructuring of the capitalist system and a technological revolution. This is the thesis of this book, now in paperback. Castells not only brings together an impressive array of evidence to support it but puts forward a new body of theory to explain it. He analyzes the interaction between information technology, economic restructuring and socio-spatial change through the empirical observation of contemporary national, urban and regional processes in the capitalist world, with emphasis on the United States. The author summarizes a very wide range of evidence of urban and regional development, and isolates the causes and consequences of the processes and trends that may be observed.

Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 1991
ISBN 0631179372, 9780631179375
Length 402 pages

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Ronald E. Day: The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power (2001)

“Ronald E. Day provides a historically informed critical analysis of the concept and politics of information in the twentieth century. Analyzing texts in Europe and the United States, his critical reading method goes beyond traditional historiographical readings of communication and information by engaging specific historical texts in terms of their attempts to construct and reshape history.

After laying the groundwork and justifying his method of close reading for this study, Day examines the texts of two pre-World War II documentalists, Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet. Through the work of Otlet and Briet, Day shows how documentation and information were associated with concepts of cultural progress. Day also discusses the social expansion of the conduit metaphor in the works of Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener. He then shows how the work of contemporary French multimedia theorist Pierre Lévy refracts the earlier philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari through the prism of the capitalist understanding of the “virtual society.”

Turning back to the pre-World War II period, Day examines two critics of the information society: Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. He explains Heidegger’s philosophical critique of the information culture’s model of language and truth as well as Benjamin’s aesthetic and historical critique of mass information and communication. Day concludes by contemplating the relation of critical theory and information, particularly in regard to the information culture’s transformation of history, historiography, and historicity into positive categories of assumed and represented knowledge.”

Publisher SIU Press, 2001
ISBN 0809323907, 9780809323906
152 pages

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Amalia E. Gnanadesikan: The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet (2008)

In a world of rapid technological advancements, it can be easy to forget that writing is the original Information Technology, created to transcend the limitations of human memory and to defy time and space. The Writing Revolution picks apart the development of this communication tool to show how it has conquered the world.

* Explores how writing has liberated the world, making possible everything from complex bureaucracy, literature, and science, to instruction manuals and love letters
* Draws on an engaging range of examples, from the first cuneiform clay tablet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Japanese syllabaries, to the printing press and the text messaging
* Weaves together ideas from a number of fields, including history, cultural studies and archaeology, as well as linguistics and literature, to create an interdisciplinary volume
* Traces the origins of each of the world’s major written traditions, along with their applications, adaptations, and cultural influences

Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 2008
ISBN 1405154063, 9781405154062
Length 328 pages

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