Consider Facebook--it's human contact, only easier to engage with and easier to avoid. Developing technology promises closeness. Sometimes it delivers, but much of our modern life leaves us less connected with people and more connected to simulations of them.In Alone Together, MIT technology and society professor Sherry Turkle explores the power of our new tools and toys to dramatically alter our social lives. It's a nuanced exploration of what we are looking for--and sacrificing--in a world of electronic companions and social networking tools, and an argument that, despite the hand-waving of ... View More...
The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified facts. What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders o... View More...
In lively, mordantly witty prose, Negroponte decodes the mysteries--and debunks the hype--surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet, and explains why such touted innovations as the fax and the CD-ROM are likely to go the way of the BetaMax. " Succinct and readable. . . . If you suffer from digital anxiety . . . here is a book that lays it all out for you." --Newsday. View More...
Ditching their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid," the Brende family conceives a real life experiment to see if in fact all our cell phones, wide screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier and better-or whether life would be preferable without them. By turns, the query narrows down to a single question: "What is the least we need to achieve the most?" With this in mind, the Brendes begin an 18-month trial run that will dramatically change the way they live and prove entertaining and surprising to students. Better Off is a smar... View More...
The rise of open data in the public sector has sparked innovation, driven efficiency, and fueled economic development. While still emerging, we are seeing evidence of the transformative potential of open data in shaping the future of our civic life, and the opportunity to use open data to reimagine the relationship between residents and government, especially at the local level. As we look ahead, what have we learned so far from open data in practice and how we can apply those lessons to realize a more promising future for America's cities and communities? Edited by Brett Goldstein, former Ch... View More...
Born from today's evolutionary psychology and its studies of developing human behavior and emotions is the radical new concept from psychotherapist Jeri Fink that virtual reality has been with us since humans first walked the earth and has only been heightened by today's technology. Psychologically, humans are "wired" to crave experiences beyond our daily existence. From the cave dweller's fireside stories of slaying massive beasts and the Elizabethan experience of Shakespeare's tragedies to today's blockbuster disaster movies and, most importantly, interactive computer communication, we have ... View More...
This text presents an analysis of modernity's impact on the psyche. Modernization has brought many material benefits, yet we are constantly told how unhappy we are: crime, divorce, suicide, depression and anxiety are rampant. How can this contradiction be reconciled? Tod Sloan develops an integrated theory of the self in society by combining perspectives on personality development and sociohistorical processes to explore our complex response to modernization. He discusses the implications of postmodern theory for psychology and proposes concrete responses to address the issue of mass emotional... View More...
There's a hidden science that affects every part of your life, a science so powerful that you would be hard-pressed to find a single human being on the planet unaffected by its achievements. It is the science behind computers, the machines which drive the supply and creation of power, food, medicine, money, communication, entertainment, and most goods our stores. It has transformed societies with the Internet, the digitization of information, mobile phone networks, and GPS technologies. Written in friendly and approachable language, Digitized provides a window onto the mysterious field from wh... View More...
An Economist Best Book of the YearA PBS NewsHour Book of the YearAn Entrepeneur Top Business Book An Amazon Best Book of the Year in Business and LeadershipNew York Times Bestseller Foreword by Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of our Nature Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world--provided we ask the right questions.By the end of an average day in the early twen... View More...
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 construct... View More...
Shows how we must make deep changes to complete our paradigm shift from the old mechanistic worldview to the new organic worldview - Reveals the distinct stages of paradigm shifts through the ages, including the 18th-century Enlightenment and the critical stage of our current shift - Explains how the new organic worldview began with Goethe and Kant - Offers solutions for each of us to be able to realize and make the deep changes needed for global regeneration In Global Awakening, Michael Schacker shows that hidden within our global crises is a positive future for the planet. Sharing his 30 yea... View More...
The things we're most proud of in life - the child we're raising; the marathon we completed; the major project we hit out of the park - theswe required all of us: all of our attention, all of our loves, all of our effort. Could we control the outcome? No. Were we all in? Hell, yes. These effortful pursuits are what digital well being pinoeer Christina Crook calls good burdens. In thoughful prose, The Marie Kondo of Digital's insightful follow up to the acclaimed The Joy of Misssing Out makes the case for increasing intentionality in our day to day lives, unlocking the bulding blocks of joy, an... View More...
The transformation of images in the age of new media and the digital revolution.Digital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. In How Images Think, Ron Burnett explores this new ecology, which has transformed the relationships humans have with t... View More...
In How Invention Begins, Lienhard reconciles the ends of invention with the individual leaps upon which they are built, illuminating the vast web of individual inspirations that lie behind whole technologies. He traces, for instance, the way in which thousands of people applied their combined inventive genius to airplanes, railroad engines, and automobiles. As he does so, it becomes clear that a collective desire, an upwelling of fascination, a spirit of the times--a Zeitgeist--laid its hold upon inventors. The thing they all sought to create was speed itself. Likewise, Lienhard shows that whe... View More...
Hybrids of Modernity considers the relationship between three western modernist institutions: anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition. It looks at the ways in which these institutions are linked, in how they are engaged in the objectification of culture, and in how they have themselves become objects of cultural theory, the targets of critics who claim that despite their continuing visibility these are all institutions with questionable viability in the late 20th century. Through analysis of the Universal Exhibition held in seville in 1992, the themes of culture, nationalit... View More...
This is the Word -- one man's word, certainly -- about the art (and artifice) of the state of our computer-centric existence. And considering that the one man is Neal Stephenson, the hacker Hemingway (Newsweek) -- acclaimed novelist, pragmatist, seer, nerd-friendly philosopher, and nationally bestselling author of groundbreaking literary works (Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., etc.) -- the word is well worth hearing. Mostly well-reasoned examination and partial rant, Stephenson's In the Beginning... was the Command Line is a thoughtful, irreverent, hilarious treatise on the cyber-culture past... View More...
On July 25, 2000, a small piece of debris on the runway at a Paris airport caused a tire to blow out on an Air France Concorde during its take off. A heavy slab of rubber that spun off from a tire created a shock wave in a wing tank, which burst open and sent fuel streaming into an engine intake. As flames trailed two hundred feet behind, the aircraft rolled out of control. The crash killed all 109 people on board and 4 more on the ground.The tragedy of that departing Concorde is just one of many such chain-reaction catastrophes that have occurred as the world has grown more technologically co... View More...
Well known for his column in The New Yorker, Lewis Mumford is widely regarded as the foremost urban critic of this century. Through historical and theoretical perspectives, author Mark Luccarelli traces the development of Mumford's thought on regional planning focusing on his pioneering concept of an ecologically-based region and shows how he attempted to turn his ideas into reality through the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). This informative book also demonstrates how Mumford's ideas remain extraordinarily relevant and valuable to today's urban problems. View More...
We live in a world unimaginable only decades ago: a domain of backlit screens, instant information, and vibrant experiences that can outcompete dreary reality. Our brave new technologies offer incredible opportunities for work and play. But at what price? Now renowned neuroscientist Susan Greenfield--known in the United Kingdom for challenging entrenched conventional views--brings together a range of scientific studies, news events, and cultural criticism to create an incisive snapshot of "the global now." Disputing the assumption that our technologies are harmless tools, Greenfield explores ... View More...
Computers built from DNA, bacteria, or foam. Robots that fix themselves on Mars. Bridges that report when they are aging. This is the bizarre and fascinating world of Natural Computing. Computer scientist and Scientific American s Puzzling Adventures columnist Dennis Shasha here teams up with journalist Cathy Lazere to explore the outer reaches of computing. Drawing on interviews with fifteen leading scientists, the authors present an unexpected vision: the future of computing is a synthesis with nature. That vision will change not only computer science but also fields as disparate as finance,... View More...
In recent decades, media outlets in the United States--most notably the Internet--have claimed to serve the public's ever-greater thirst for information. Scandals are revealed, details are laid bare because the public needs to know. In Publicity's Secret, Jodi Dean claims that the public's demands for information both coincide with the interests of the media industry and reinforce the cynicism promoted by contemporary technoculture. Democracy has become a spectacle, and Dean asserts that theories of the public sphere endanger democratic politics in the information age.Dean's argument is built ... View More...
A field manual to the technologies that are transforming our lives Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to re-evaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future. We already depend on the smartphone to navigate every aspect of our existence. We're told that innovations--from augmented-reality interfaces an... View More...
A field guide to our mechanical future, presenting the next generation of intelligent robots and their makers.Around the world, scientists and engineers are participating in a high-stakes race to build the first intelligent robot. Many robots already exist--automobile factories are full of them. But the new generation of robots will be something else: smart machines that act like living creatures. When they are brought into existence, science fiction will have become fact.What will happen then? With our prosthetic limbs, titanium hips, and artificial eyes, we are already beginning to resemble ... View More...
Literary critics have long regarded the rejection of technology as a distinguishing feature of American Romanticism. Yet as Klaus Benesch shows in this insightful study, the attitude of antebellum writers toward the advent of the machine age was far more complicated than often supposed. Although fraught with tension, the relationship between professional authorship and evolving technology reflected a pattern of adjustment rather than opposition, as writers sought to redefine their place within a culture that increasingly valued the engineer and the scientist. View More...
Simians, Cyborgs and Women is a powerful collection of ten essays written between 1978 and 1989. Although on the surface, simians, cyborgs and women may seem an odd threesome, Haraway describes their profound link as "creatures" which have had a great destabilizing place in Western evolutionary technology and biology. Throughout this book, Haraway analyzes accounts, narratives, and stories of the creation of nature, living organisms, and cyborgs. At once a social reality and a science fiction, the cyborg--a hybrid of organism and machine--represents transgressed boundaries and intense fusions ... View More...
Presenting the methods and theories available for exploring the effects of technology on our lives past, present, and future, this work is designed as a primer to give investigators and students the necessary intellectual tools to begin their own research into the field. Providing a clear presentation of the underlying theories, it reduces the issues to their primary nature, helping to simplify a complex subject and support creative thought processes. It also covers chaos theory and introduces the concepts of the subject and how they apply to the subject matter of the book. View More...
Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema is the indispensable history of underground cinema, an untold story that includes the British independent and French avant-garde cinemas of the 1920s, the counterculture film movements of the 1960s, the microcinema resurgence of the 1990s, and beyond. Dispensing with simplistic "art versus commerce" discourses, Subversion not only discovers the cultural roots of underground filmmaking in bohemian cabarets of nineteenth-century Paris and the fairbooths of medieval London, but situates the underground as a radical and popular subculture se... View More...
In this witty, often terrifying work of cultural criticism, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death chronicles our transformation into a Technopoly: a society that no longer merely uses technology as a support system but instead is shaped by it--with radical consequences for the meanings of politics, art, education, intelligence, and truth. View More...
The famous 1893 Chicago World's Fair celebrated the dawn of corporate capitalism and a new Machine Age with an exhibit of the world's largest engine. Yet the noise was so great, visitors ran out of the Machinery Hall to retreat to the peace and quiet of the Japanese pavilion's Buddhist temples and lotus ponds. Thus began over a century of the West's turn toward an Asian aesthetic as an antidote to modern technology. From the turn-of-the-century Columbian Exhibition to the latest Zen-inspired designs of Apple, Inc., R. John Williams charts the history of our embrace of Eastern ideals of beauty... View More...
In the early twentieth century, an era characterized by unprecedented industrial strife and violence, thousands of employers across the United States pioneered a new policy of labor relations called welfare work. The results of the policy were paternalistic practices and forms of compensation designed not only to control workers, but also to advertise the humanity of corporate capitalism to thwart the advance of legislated reform. In a burgeoning literature on the development of the U.S. welfare state, Andrea Tone offers a new interpretation of the importance of welfare capitalism in shaping i... View More...
Imagine direct communication links between the human brain and machines, or tailored materials capable of adapting by themselves to changing environmental conditions, or computer chips and environmental sensors embedded into everyday clothing, or medical technologies that eliminate currently untreatable conditions such as blindness and paralysis. Now imagine all of these developments occurring at the same time. Far-fetched? Not So. These are actually the reasonable predictions of scientists attempting to forecast a few decades into the future based on the rapid pace of innovation. Author Stanl... View More...
How seemingly innocuous technologies are unsettling the balance of power by putting it in the hands of the masses - and what a world without "big" will mean for all of us.In The End of Big, social media pioneer, political and business strategist, and Harvard Kennedy School faculty member Nicco Mele offers a fascinating, sometimes frightening look at how our ability to stay connected - constantly, instantly, and globally - is dramatically changing our world.Governments are being upended by individuals relying only on social media. Major political parties are seeing their power eroded by grassro... View More...
In a provocative new interpretation of a transforming era in American history, Maury Klein examines the forces that turned the United States from a rural agricultural society to an urban industrial one. Integrating social, economic, and business history, he stresses the driving role of technology and the emergence of a complex society of many cultures, lacking a cohesive center. The rise of a corporate economy, described by Mr. Klein, resulted in productive miracles unequaled elsewhere-but at the cost of great social dislocation in American life. Gradually there arose a society that organized ... View More...
Making a brilliant case that the 21st century, even more than the 20th, will be "The American Century, " and that America's global dominance will be associated with a revolution in weaponry and warfare as basic as the one that arose with the development of gunpowder 500 years ago, The Future of War speaks of a new geopolitical system that will shape the next century. 480 pp. Author tour. Radio & print ads. National publicity. 25,000 print. View More...
What is life? Is it just the biologically familiar--birds, trees, snails, people--or is it an infinitely complex set of patterns that a computer could simulate? What role does intelligence play in separating the organic from the inorganic, the living from the inert? Does life evolve along a predestined path, or does it suddenly emerge from what appeared lifeless and programmatic? In this easily accessible and wide-ranging survey, Claus Emmeche outlines many of the challenges and controversies involved in the dynamic and curious science of artificial life. Emmeche describes the work being done... View More...
