From the 15th century until the mid-1990s, media based on the printed word--books, magazines, handbills, newspapers, and journals--dominated society. Today, an onslaught of digital media centered on the Internet is developing at a breathtaking pace, destabilizing the very idea of printed media and fundamentally reshaping our world in the process.
This study explores how Internet entities like Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google, and gadgets such as digital cameras, cell phones, video games, robots, drones, and all things MacIntosh have affected everything from the book industry and copyright law to how we conduct social relationships and consider knowledge. Including a chronology of significant events in the history of the digital explosion, this investigation of the often overlooked "shadow" side of new technology chronicles life during a radical societal shift and follows the process whereby one world disintegrates while another takes its place.
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Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für Beruf und Forschung
Interest Age: From 18 years
Produkt-Hinweis
Illustrationen
appendix, notes, bibliography, index
Maße
Höhe: 229 mm
Breite: 152 mm
Dicke: 14 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-7864-6560-6 (9780786465606)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
John David Ebert is the author of four previous books and has published essays in such periodicals as the Antioch Review, Utne Reader, Parabola, and Whole Earth. He has also been a featured scholar on A&E's Ancient Mysteries.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Incipit
Incipit
Introduction to a Catastrophic Bifurcation
When Worlds Close Down
Extinction Event
The Internet vs. the Printing Press
The Internet and Radio
Destabilizations
First, a Brief Note on the Self-Luminous Nature of the New Technologies
PART I: IN WHICH THE INTERNET RECREATES THE WORLD-AS-CAVERN
1. Amazon.com, the Kindle and the Collapse of the Book Industry
Word vs. Byte
Not a Bookstore
A Transcendentalist Operation
E-Readers
Retrievals and Disappearances
2. YouTube and the Twilight of Copyright
Glass-Cased Installation
An Evanescent Horizon
Partial Objects
Electronic Decay Rate
Founders
Cultural Memory
Free Movies
The Gutenberg Episteme
Diasporic Public Spheres
The Hitler Parodies
3. On Facebook We're All Being Flattened Together
Faciality
The Mask Is Inimical to Facebook
You Have
Friend Request
The Disappearance of Neighborhoods
The World Isn't Flat, You Are
4. Wikipedia; or, The Catastrophe of Knowledge
Not an Encyclopedia
A Miniature History of the Book
Back to Wikipedia
Knowledge Crisis
Borges, Prophet of Wikipedia
Who Needs It?
5. WikiLeaks and the Death of Culture
Intelligible Sphere
Armor of Light
The Cultural Function of Secrets
Disrupting Culture
The Death of the Event
The Event That Never Happened
Information War
6. On the Metaphysics of Google Earth
Some Concluding Comments to Part I: A Miniature History of Capitalism (or, The Evolution of Aladdin's Cave)
PART II: A COLLECTION OF GADGETS FOR A MUSEUM OF THE FUTURE
7. The Mythology and Metaphysics of the Macintosh
The Myth
The Commercial
The Subtle Body of the Text
Luminous Technology
The One Non-Negotiable Element of the Personal Computer
A Brief History of Invisible Worlds
Digital
Subtle Matter in Cyberspace
8. Digital Photography and the End of the Visionary Image
The World's First Photograph
Syncopated Images
A Confession
The Necessity of the Negative
Literal Images
Photographic Haiku
Edward Weston
Mapplethorpe's Daydream
The Luminous Images of Edward Burtynsky
The Loss of Visionary Coherence
The Elimination of the Hand
Elegy for Analogue
9. How Cell Phones Disrupt the Flows
Derailment
Revolutions
Human Prostheses of the Matrix
The Invasion
Disembodied Voices
10. The Killing Eye: Video Games, Surrogate Violence and the Dismantling of Social Machines
Prophet of the Labyrinth
Decoding the Flows
The Individual as Epic Hero
Grand Theft Auto and J.G. Ballard
World of Warcraft: Hell Is Other People
11. Robots, Drones and the Disappearance of the Human Being
How Drones Retrieve Aristotelian Physics
Video Game Training
The Eye of Horus
Heroic
The Two Revolutions Become
The Equation
Facts and Figures
The Superfluous Human
The Hive Society
12. A Few Words on the Ovei Pod and the End of History
Electronic Isolation Tank
The Bygone Age of the Macrosphere
The Personal (and Very Private) Microsphere
Some Concluding Comments to Part II: A Miniature History of War and Technology (Since 1815)
Postscript on the Dialectic of Art and Technology
Appendix: Chronology of Key Events
Notes
Bibliography
Index
