Information Fantasies

Author: Xiao Liu
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452959498
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourses Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism. Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production. Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.

Fantasies of the Library

Author: Anna-Sophie Springer
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026253617X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
A book that acts both as library and exhibition space, selecting, arranging, and housing texts and images, aligning itself with printed matter in the process. Fantasies of the Library lets readers experience the library anew. The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others. The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.” Contributors Erin Kissane, Hammad Nasar, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Anna-Sophie Springer, Charles Stankievech, Katharina Tauer, Etienne Turpin, Andrew Norman Wilson, Joanna Zylinska

Fantasies of Identification

Author: Ellen Jean Samuels
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479855049
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the fantasy of identificationOCothe powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact.From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, a Fantasies of Identification aexplores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity."

How Fantasy Becomes Reality

Author: Karen Dill-Shackleford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190239298
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
From smartphones to social media, from streaming videos to fitness bands, our devices bring us information and entertainment all day long, forming an intimate part of our lives. Their ubiquity represents a major shift in human experience, and although we often hold our devices dear, we do not always fully appreciate how their nearly constant presence can influence our lives for better and for worse. In this revised and expanded edition of How Fantasy Becomes Reality, social psychologist Karen E. Dill-Shackleford explains what the latest science tells us about how our devices influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In engaging, conversational prose, she discusses both the benefits and the risks that come with our current level of media saturation. The wide-ranging conversation explores Avatar, Mad Men, Grand Theft Auto, and Comic Con to address critical issues such as media violence, portrayals of social groups, political coverage, and fandom. Her conclusions will empower readers to make our favorite sources of entertainment and information work for us and not against us.

Storytelling in Organizations

Author: Laurence Prusak
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113636336X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description
This book is the story of how four busy executives, from different backgrounds and different perspectives, were surprised to find themselves converging on the idea of narrative as an extraordinarily valuable lens for understanding and managing organizations in the twenty-first century. The idea that narrative and storytelling could be so powerful a tool in the world of organizations was initially counter-intuitive. But in their own words, John Seely Brown, Steve Denning, Katalina Groh, and Larry Prusak describe how they came to see the power of narrative and storytelling in their own experience working on knowledge management, change management, and innovation strategies in organizations such as Xerox, the World Bank, and IBM. Storytelling in Organizations lays out for the first time why narrative and storytelling should be part of the mainstream of organizational and management thinking. This case has not been made before. The tone of the book is also unique. The engagingly personal and idiosyncratic tone comes from a set of presentations made at a Smithsonian symposium on storytelling in April 2001. Reading it is as stimulating as spending an evening with Larry Prusak or John Seely Brown. The prose is probing, playful, provocative, insightful and sometime profound. It combines the liveliness and freshness of spoken English with the legibility of a ready-friendly text. Interviews will all the authors done in 2004 add a new dimension to the material, allowing the authors to reflect on their ideas and clarify points or highlight ideas that may have changed or deepened over time.

The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom

Author: Tison Pugh
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813591759
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
The Queer Fantasies of the American Family Sitcom examines the evasive depictions of sexuality in domestic and family-friendly sitcoms. Tison Pugh charts the history of increasing sexual depiction in this genre while also unpacking how sitcoms use sexuality as a source of power, as a kind of camouflage, and as a foundation for family building. The book examines how queerness, at first latent, became a vibrant yet continually conflicted part of the family-sitcom tradition. Taking into account elements such as the casting of child actors, the use of and experimentation with plot traditions, the contradictory interpretive valences of comedy, and the subtle subversions of moral standards by writers and directors, Pugh points out how innocence and sexuality conflict on television. As older sitcoms often sit on a pedestal of nostalgia as representative of the Golden Age of the American Family, television history reveals a deeper, queerer vision of family bonds.

Fantasies of Neglect

Author: Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813573629
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
In our current era of helicopter parenting and stranger danger, an unaccompanied child wandering through the city might commonly be viewed as a victim of abuse and neglect. However, from the early twentieth century to the present day, countless books and films have portrayed the solitary exploration of urban spaces as a source of empowerment and delight for children. Fantasies of Neglect explains how this trope of the self-sufficient, mobile urban child originated and considers why it persists, even as it goes against the grain of social reality. Drawing from a wide range of films, children’s books, adult novels, and sociological texts, Pamela Robertson Wojcik investigates how cities have simultaneously been demonized as dangerous spaces unfit for children and romanticized as wondrous playgrounds that foster a kid’s independence and imagination. Charting the development of free-range urban child characters from Little Orphan Annie to Harriet the Spy to Hugo Cabret, and from Shirley Temple to the Dead End Kids, she considers the ongoing dialogue between these fictional representations and shifting discourses on the freedom and neglect of children. While tracking the general concerns Americans have expressed regarding the abstract figure of the child, the book also examines the varied attitudes toward specific types of urban children—girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich kids and poor ones, loners and neighborhood gangs. Through this diverse selection of sources, Fantasies of Neglect presents a nuanced chronicle of how notions of American urbanism and American childhood have grown up together.

Keeping It Unreal

Author: Darieck Scott
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479824143
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
Introduction: Fantastic Bullets -- I Am Nubia: Superhero Comics and the Paradigm of the Fantasy-Act -- Can the Black Superhero Be? -- Erotic Fantasy-Acts: The Art of Desire -- Conclusion: On Becoming Fantastical.

The Madness of Knowledge

Author: Steven Connor
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178914101X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge – the lusts, fantasies, dreams and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia, or love of knowledge, and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking and the desire for knowledge. Steven Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and ‘general knowledge’, charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.

7 FIGURE FICTION

Author: T. Taylor
Publisher: Theodora Taylor
ISBN: 1942167598
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 163

Book Description
There are only, in my humble opinion, two kinds of readers. Readers who love your books. and… Readers who don’t know they love your books yet. But how do you reach those readers in the second category, no matter what kind of writer you are? The answer to that question is… Universal Fantasy Universal Fantasy is why my sales tripled when I “accidentally” wrote three books that landed in the Amazon Top 100. Universal Fantasy is why some authors get gobs of gushing reviews and some authors who write “way better” get crickets. Universal Fantasy is the answer to many of the questions you might have thought were unanswerable or simply up to luck, like… • Will this sell? • Why is that selling? • Why didn’t this sell? • Will readers like what I am writing? • Why do I love the TV shows/books/entertainments I do? • Why did I buy that thing I bought when I didn’t intend to buy it? BE WARNED…once known, Universal Fantasy cannot be undiscovered. Leave this book be if you’re truly satisfied with your current writing life. But if you’re not afraid—if you’re ready to know the secret hidden inside all bestselling stories, open this gift and find out how to use UNIVERSAL FANTASY to write and market books that SELL to ANYONE.