Patrice Flichy: The Internet Imaginaire (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1990s, arpanet, computing, cyberpunk, cyberspace, freenet, history of communications, history of computing, history of technology, internet, networks, technology, usenet, utopia, virtual communities, virtual reality, web, wired
In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet—the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical “information superhighway” became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another.
Flichy draws on writings by experts—paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week—from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture—the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on “the virtual society imaginaire,” discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial.
Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262062615, 9780262062619
255 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)Anna Everett, John Thornton Caldwell (eds.): New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, cinema, computer animation, cyberpunk, cyborg, digital culture, digital media, interface, internet, media theory, new media, posthuman, programming, television, virtual reality
The mushroom-like growth of new media technologies is radically challenging traditional media outlets. The proliferation of technologies like DVDs, MP3s and the Internet has freed the public from what we used to understand as “mass media.” In the face of such seismic shifts and ruptures, the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of film and TV studies are being shaken to their core. New Media demands a necessary rethinking of the field. Writing from a range of disciplines and perspectives, the scholars here outline new theses and conceptual frameworks capable of engaging the numerous facets of emergent digital technology.
Publisher Routledge, 2003
AFI Film Readers series
ISBN 041593995X, 9780415939959
274 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-31)
Comment (0)Charlie Gere: Digital Culture. 2nd ed. (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · arpanet, counterculture, cybernetics, cyberpunk, digital culture, facebook, fluxus, neoliberalism, technology
From our bank accounts to supermarket checkouts to the movies we watch, strings of ones and zeroes suffuse our world. Digital technology has defined modern society in numerous ways, and the vibrant digital culture that has now resulted is the subject of Charlie Gere’s engaging volume.
In this revised and expanded second edition, taking account of new developments such as Facebook and the iPhone, Charlie Gere charts in detail the history of digital culture, as marked by responses to digital technology in art, music, design, film, literature and other areas. After tracing the historical development of digital culture, Gere argues that it is actually neither radically new nor technologically driven: digital culture has its roots in the eighteenth century and the digital mediascape we swim in today was originally inspired by informational needs arising from industrial capitalism, contemporary warfare and counter-cultural experimentation, among other social changes.
A timely and cutting-edge investigation of our contemporary social infrastructures, Digital Culture is essential reading for all those concerned about the ever-changing future of our Digital Age.
Edition 2
Publisher Reaktion Books, 2009
ISBN 1861893884, 9781861893888
240 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)
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