John Avery: Information Theory and Evolution (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · bioinformatics, biology, biosemiotics, entropy, evolution, information technology, information theory
This highly interdisciplinary book discusses the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution (and also human cultural evolution), against the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Among the central themes is the seeming contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems. This paradox has its resolution in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources, as the author shows. The role of information in human cultural evolution is another focus of the book. One of the final chapters discusses the merging of information technology and biotechnology into a new discipline — bio-information technology.
Publisher World Scientific, 2003
ISBN 9812383999, 9789812383990
Length 217 pages
tripleC journal: Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture, Vol 8, No 2 (2010)
Filed under journal | Tags: · capitalism, communication, financial crisis, information society, information technology, media
The worldwide economic downturn is indicative for a new large crisis of capitalism. The future of capitalism is in this situation not determined, but depends on collective human agency. This introduction to the special issue of tripleC on “Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture” presents general arguments about the crisis, a general model of the political economy of capitalist communication, and a systematic typology of literature about capitalist crisis & communication. The introduced model of the political economy of capitalist communication is comprised of seven interconnected moments: 1) the media content industry, 2) the media infrastructure industry, 3) the interaction of the media economy and the non-media economy, 4) the interaction of the finance sector and the media economy, 5) alternative media, 6) media reception, 7) media prosumption. The model is used for classifying actual and potential research about the communicative dimension of the new capitalist crisis.
tripleC (cognition, communication, co-operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information
Society 8 (2): 193-309.
Editors: Fuchs, Christian, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus Breen.
Special issue on “Capitalist crisis, communication & culture“.
tripleC is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN: 1726-670X)
All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Austria License.
Christian Fuchs: Internet and Society. Social Theory in the Information Age (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · collaboration, facebook, gift economy, information technology, internet, mass media, myspace, neoliberalism, politics, technology, virtual communities, youtube
In this study, Christian Fuchs discusses how the internet has transformed the lives of human beings and social relationships in contemporary society. By outlining a social theory of the internet and the information society, he demonstrates how the ecological, economic, political, and cultural systems of contemporary society have been transformed by new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new forms of cooperation and competition are advanced and supported by the internet in subsystems of society and also discusses opportunities and risks of the information society.
Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN 0415961327, 9780415961325
398 pages