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Author : Howard P. Segal
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2005-11-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0815630611
Featuring twenty-five writers in all, this book includes Howard P. Segal's acclaimed work on utopian visionaries.
Author : Howard P. Segal
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 301 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 1985
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0226744388
Author : Howard P. Segal
Publisher : Shot Historical Perspectives o
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2006
Category : History
ISBN : 0872291472
Segal examines the historical connection between technology and utopia, and shows how this connection is not just a contemporary western concept, but one that stretches back several centuries.
Author : Fred Turner
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2010-10-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226817439
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
Author : Howard P. Segal
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-02
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781118234402
This brief history connects the past and present of utopian thought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up to present day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise. Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about the societies who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over the centuries Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions of utopia Explores the many forms utopias have taken – prophecies and oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physical communities – and also discusses high-tech and cyberspace visions for the first time The first book to analyze the implicitly utopian dimensions of reform crusades like Technocracy of the 1930s and Modernization Theory of the 1950s, and the laptop classroom initiatives of recent years
Author : Nicholas Carr
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2016-09-06
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780393254556
A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.
Author : Grafton Tanner
Publisher : John Hunt Publishing
Page : 166 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2020-12-11
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9781789040234
Shocked by 9/11, the Great Recession, digital anxiety, and ecological collapse, the West suffers from nostalgia. People everywhere yearn for a utopian version of the past that never existed. Desperate for relief, many long to escape from the present. Some will stop at nothing to achieve it. In his essential new book, Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, argues that our nostalgia today is partly a consequence of the attention economy. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, and old prejudices are percolating into the present, Big Tech’s predictive algorithms are locking us into nostalgic feedback loops. The result is a precarious society with its gaze fixed on the good old days. Spanning from the ancient Sophists to Black Mirror, The Circle of the Snake is at once a reckoning with the myth of digital utopia and an incisive analysis of nostalgia as a weapon to spread fascism.
Author : Susan M. Matarese
Publisher : Univ of Massachusetts Press
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2010-03-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1558497706
An innovative look at the cultural roots of American foreign policy.
Author : Joan Shelley Rubin,Scott E. Casper
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 1551 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2013-03-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9780199764358
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History brings together in one two-volume set the record of the nation's values, aspirations, anxieties, and beliefs as expressed in both everyday life and formal bodies of thought. Over the past twenty years, the field of cultural history has moved to the center of American historical studies, and has come to encompass the experiences of ordinary citizens in such arenas as reading and religious practice as well as the accomplishments of prominent artists and writers. Some of the most imaginative scholarship in recent years has emerged from this burgeoning field. The scope of the volume reflects that development: the encyclopedia incorporates popular entertainment ranging from minstrel shows to video games, middlebrow ventures like Chautauqua lectures and book clubs, and preoccupations such as "Perfectionism" and "Wellness" that have shaped Americans' behavior at various points in their past and that continue to influence attitudes in the present. The volumes also make available recent scholarly insights into the writings of political scientists, philosophers, feminist theorists, social reformers, and other thinkers whose works have furnished the underpinnings of Americans' civic activities and personal concerns. Anyone wishing to understand the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of the United States from the early days of settlement to the twenty-first century will find the encyclopedia invaluable.
Author : Dimitri Uzunidis
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2020-09-22
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781119779384
Author : John Tresch
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 469 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2012-02-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226812229
In the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment’s emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society. Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today. Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, The Romantic Machine is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.
Author : Andrew Pilsch
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2017-08-15
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781452954882
Transhumanism posits that humanity is on the verge of rapid evolutionary change as a result of emerging technologies and increased global consciousness. However, this insight is dismissed as a naive and controversial reframing of posthumanist thought, having also been vilified as “the most dangerous idea in the world” by Francis Fukuyama. In this book, Andrew Pilsch counters these critiques, arguing instead that transhumanism’s utopian rhetoric actively imagines radical new futures for the species and its habitat. Pilsch situates contemporary transhumanism within the longer history of a rhetorical mode he calls “evolutionary futurism” that unifies diverse texts, philosophies, and theories of science and technology that anticipate a radical explosion in humanity’s cognitive, physical, and cultural potentialities. By conceptualizing transhumanism as a rhetoric, as opposed to an obscure group of fringe figures, he explores the intersection of three major paradigms shaping contemporary Western intellectual life: cybernetics, evolutionary biology, and spiritualism. In analyzing this collision, his work traces the belief in a digital, evolutionary, and collective future through a broad range of texts written by theologians and mystics, biologists and computer scientists, political philosophers and economic thinkers, conceptual artists and Golden Age science fiction writers. Unearthing the long history of evolutionary futurism, Pilsch concludes, allows us to more clearly see the novel contributions that transhumanism offers for escaping our current geopolitical bind by inspiring radical utopian thought.
Author : Lisa Rosner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2013-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135938505
The term "technological fix" should mean a fix provided by technology--a solution for all of our problems, from medicine and food production to the environment and business. Instead, technological fix has come to mean a cheap, quick fix using inappropriate technology that usually creates more problems than it solves. This collection sets out the distinction between a technological fix and a true technological solution. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines, the essays trace the technological fix as it has appeared throughout the twentieth century. Addressing such "fixes" as artificial hearts, industrial agriculture and climate engineering, these essays examine our need to turn to technology for solutions to all of our problems.
Author : Lizzie O'Shea
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2021-08-17
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9781788734318
A highly engaging tour through progressive history in the service of emancipating our digital tomorrow Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Australia When we talk about technology we always talk about tomorrow and the future—which makes it hard to figure out how to even get there. In Future Histories, public interest lawyer and digital specialist Lizzie O'Shea argues that we need to stop looking forward and start looking backwards. Weaving together histories of computing and progressive social movements with modern theories of the mind, society, and self, O'Shea constructs a “usable past” that can help us determine our digital future. What, she asks, can the Paris Commune tell us about earlier experiments in sharing resources—like the Internet—in common? How can Frantz Fanon's theories of anti colonial self-determination help us build digital world in which everyone can participate equally? Can debates over equal digital access be helped by American revolutionary Tom Paine's theories of democratic, economic redistribution? What can indigenous land struggles teach us about stewarding our digital climate? And, how is Elon Musk not a future visionary but a steampunk throwback to Victorian-era technological utopians? In engaging, sparkling prose, O'Shea shows us how very human our understanding of technology is, and how when we draw on the resources of the past, we can see the potential for struggle, for liberation, for art and poetry in our technological present. Future Histories is for all of us—makers, coders, hacktivists, Facebook-users, self-styled Luddites—who find ourselves in a brave new world.
Author : Nathaniel Robert Walker
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 577 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2020-11-26
Category : History
ISBN : 9780198861447
A study of British and American Utopian writing of the 1800s in the context of developments in real architectural, political, and cultural life. The book studies utopian visions published in the UK and the USA in the 1800s by writers such Robert Owen, James Silk Buckingham, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris.