Author: Aaron Perzanowski Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262535246 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
An argument for retaining the notion of personal property in the products we “buy” in the digital marketplace. If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn't. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property. Of course, ebooks, cloud storage, streaming, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.
Author: Sascha Pöhlmann Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110659409 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.
Author: Joseph Packer Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271083174 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction. Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.
Author: Joey Asher Publisher: Persuasive Speaker Press ISBN: 0978577604 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 166
Book Description
Whether you're seeking investors for the latest start-up or simply looking for that competitive edge, this book will help you articulate and sell the complex ideas that dominate our technology-driven business environment.
Author: Katherine Dunn Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307794482 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 366
Book Description
National Book Award Finalist • Here is the unforgettable story of the Binewskis, a circus-geek family whose matriarch and patriarch have bred their own exhibit of human oddities—with the help of amphetamines, arsenic, and radioisotopes. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Their offspring include Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family’s most precious—and dangerous—asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.
Author: Bill Dennison Publisher: AuthorHouse ISBN: 1467000949 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 500
Book Description
Was Diane really doing anything wrong? Surely no-one begrudged her odd pence? But how to make her every single action appear normal when each of her accounts, all 37 of them, were churning thousands of pounds her way week after week. The Bank had to know, but not how to act without advertising that every customer was vulnerable? Of course, it was all son Lukes fault, this special talent: embedding the trapdoor, the invisible interest payments? And what harm for a year, a few million pounds un-noticed? So why a breakdown, why wreck her retirement plans? And another threat: had Luke any friends in cyber-space - like Jas, the card, the master PIN? It might be transforming his relationship with Tanya but not with the expiry date looming, and Luke in an expensive nursing home? He needed the mother. But she had other problems. What did Tanyas friend, Ros, know: manager at one of Dianes 37 branches? But her accounts could never be closed, never be moved? And how had ex-husband, Frank, contrived to re-appear? What might he be saying to her two older children? Hadnt she made them wealthy enough? And as for her dream home: couldnt the builder have mentioned his tax affairs? Most unlucky of all, why the police: did they believe she was linked to Harry, smashing and grabbing ATMs? Could they not appreciate that was real robbery? But perhaps it explained why a Bank publicity man wanted to interview recently retired staff; might he have also have tracked down old Aunt Diana to the nursing home? Uncertainties might lie ahead but Diane remained absolutely convinced: this life-style had to be preserved. It just came down to overcoming the obstacles one by one.
Author: Joe Haldeman Publisher: Titan Comics ISBN: 1785867857 Category : Comics & Graphic Novels Languages : en Pages : 63
Book Description
The Forever War raged for centuries… but Marygay was there to see it all. During the interstellar travel that took her years, generations came and went on Earth. She eventually arrived on Aleph-10 sometime after the end of the war, when humans and the enemy Taurans were at peace. There she learned that what’s left of humanity is a hive mind, known as MAN, that inhabits 10 thousand million entities. Making use of the time paradox, Marygay spent the next 286 Earth years in the Time Warp, where she aged just one month every 10 years. This allowed her to arrive, along with other Forever War veterans, on Middle Finger. There she was reunited with her lost love, William, and free to live amongst other heterosexuals and to procreate in the traditional mammalian way. But life on Middle Finger was not as idyllic as Marygay and the others assumed and the group resolved to board the Time Warp once more. Their plan – to travel aboard it for ten years while 400 centuries pass on Middle Finger. Their hope – to return to a time without MAN and Taurans. But nothing’s ever that simple.
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