Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin: Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · computer games, digital art, film, media, new media, painting, photography, radio, remediation, self, technology, television, ubiquitous computing, virtual reality, web
Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They call this process of refashioning “remediation,” and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.
Publisher: MIT Press, 1999
ISBN: 0262024527, 9780262024525
295 pages
PDF (CHM; updated on 2012-9-3)
PDF (low quality PDF; added on 2012-9-3)
Michel Foucault: The Politics of Truth (1997/2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · christianity, critique, enlightenment, ethics, hermeneutics, marxism, ontology, phenomenology, philosophy, politics, revolution, self, subjectivity, truth
“In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatschrifte asked its audience to reply to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Immanuel Kant, following Moses Mendelssohn, took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his ‘age of reason.’ Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault released a response to Kant’s initial essay, positioning the philosopher as the initiator of the discourse, and critique, of modernity—a credit traditionally accredited to Nietzsche. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between these two philosophers, Foucault and Kant, as the framework around which these different lectures and unpublished essays are assembled. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three volume History of Sexuality. Foucault’s examination of Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” is the most “American” moment of Foucault’s thinking. It is in America that he realized the necessity of tying down his own reflection to that of the Frankfurt School. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, The Politics of Truth contains transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death.”
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer
Introduction by John Rajchman
Translated by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2007
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350393, 9781584350392
195 pages
PDF (13 MB, updated on 2017-6-26)
Comment (0)Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · critique, culture, filesharing, free culture, internet, intersubjectivity, open source, self, software, subjectivity, technological singularity, technology, web 2.0
“Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.
The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure.
Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.”
Publisher Knopf, 2010
ISBN 0307269647, 9780307269645
224 pages
Reviews: Adam Thierer (Technology Liberation Front, 2010), Clive Thompson (Bookforum, 2010).
PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-4-3)
EPUB, EPUB (added on 2012-7-15, updated on 2019-4-3)