The Internet Imaginaire

Author: Patrice Flichy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262562383
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
The collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet: what led software designers, managers, employees, politicians, and individuals to develop and adopt one particular technology. In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet—the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical "information superhighway" became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another. Flichy draws on writings by experts—paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week—from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices; and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture—the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on "the virtual society imaginaire," discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial.

Imagining the Internet

Author: Robin Mansell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199697051
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
This book brings together and reviews different disciplinary approaches to digital information and communication systems across the social sciences. It synthesises the developments of the Internet Age, and the micro and macro consequences of these developments.

The Internet Myth

Author: Paolo Bory
Publisher: University of Westminster Press
ISBN: 1912656760
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
‘The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.’ — Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies – the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasizes how a dominant narrative has extensively contributed to the construction of the Internet myth while other visions of the networked society have been erased from the collective imaginary. The book decodes, analyzes and challenges the foundations of the network ideologies looking at how networks have been imagined, designed and promoted during the crucial phase of the 1990s. Three case studies are scrutinized so as to reveal the complexity of network imaginaries in this decade: the birth of the Web and the mythopoesis of its inventor; and the histories of two Italian networking projects, the infrastructural plan Socrate and the civic network Iperbole, the first to give free Internet access to citizens. The Internet Myth thereby provides a compelling and hidden sociohistorical narrative in order to challenge one of the most powerful myths of our time. This title has been published with the financial assistance of the Fondazione Hilda e Felice Vitali, Lugano, Switzerland.

Cybercultures

Author:
Publisher: Brill
ISBN: 9401208530
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Cybercultures: Mediations of Community, Culture, Politics, is a collection of essays that critically examine the role that digital media and online cultures play in the rearticulation of contemporary societies, cultures and polities. This volume interrogates the nature and effects of the existence of cybercultures in the world of Web 2.0, new media and media convergence, and mobile digital networks. It does so by examining the effect of cybercultures upon the contemporary articulation of phenomena as diverse as bodily experience, memory, the imagination, history, political participation, the nature of community, artistic creativity, and the instability of rhetoric, language and meaning.

A History of Digital Media

Author: Gabriele Balbi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351807234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
From the punch card calculating machine to the personal computer to the iPhone and more, this in-depth text offers a comprehensive introduction to digital media history for students and scholars across media and communication studies, providing an overview of the main turning points in digital media and highlighting the interactions between political, business, technical, social, and cultural elements throughout history. With a global scope and an intermedia focus, this book enables students and scholars alike to deepen their critical understanding of digital communication, adding an understudied historical layer to the examination of digital media and societies. Discussion questions, a timeline, and previously unpublished tables and maps are included to guide readers as they learn to contextualize and critically analyze the digital technologies we use every day.

Theories of the Mobile Internet

Author: Andrew Herman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317911113
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
This volume proposes the mobile Internet is best understood as a socio-technical "assemblage" of objects, practices, symbolic representations, experiences and affects. Authors from a variety of disciplines discuss practices mediated through mobile communication, including current phone and tablet devices. The converging concepts of Materialities (ranging from the political economy of communication to physical devices) and Imaginaries (including cultural values, desires and perceptions) are touchstones for each of the chapters in the book.

Threat Talk

Author: Mary Manjikian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317010272
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
'Threat Talk' exposes how US and Chinese scientists and policy-makers have understood and responded to the problem of internet addiction in their societies. Is the internet good or bad for society? American analysts like Lessig and Zittrain suggest that the internet is inherently liberating and positive for society, while Morozov and Sageman warn that the internet poses risks to citizens and societies. Using a comparative framework to illustrate how the two states differ in their assessments of the risks to citizens posed by the introduction of new technology, Mary Manjikian compellingly argues that both 'risk' and 'disease' are ideas which are understood differently at different historic periods and in different cultures. Her culturalist approach claims that the internet is neither inherently helpful, nor inherently threatening. Rather, its role and the dangers it poses may be understood differently by different societies. Is the internet good or bad for society? The answer, it appears, is 'it depends'.

The Political Economy of Communication

Author: Vincent Mosco
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1412947014
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
The Political Economy of Communication provides a thorough coverage of an important area of communication studies: the political economy approach to media. This highly successful text has been thoroughly updated, restructured, and rewritten in this new edition, clearly demonstrating how power operates across all media, from newspapers to Facebook, and how media power intersects with globalization, social class, race, gender and surveillance.

The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories

Author: Gerard Goggin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317607643
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1077

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories brings together research on the diverse Internet histories that have evolved in different regions, language cultures and social contexts across the globe. While the Internet is now in its fifth decade, the understanding and formulation of its histories outside of an anglophone framework is still very much in its infancy. From Tunisia to Taiwan, this volume emphasizes the importance of understanding and formulating Internet histories outside of the anglophone case studies and theoretical paradigms that have thus far dominated academic scholarship on Internet history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the collection offers a variety of historical lenses on the development of the Internet: as a new communication technology seen in the context of older technologies; as a new form of sociality read alongside previous technologically mediated means of relating; and as a new media "vehicle" for the communication of content.

Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004291393
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 561

Book Description
More than 130 years after Karl Marx’s death and 150 years after the publication of his opus magnum Capital: Critique of Political Economy, capitalism keeps being haunted by period crises. The most recent capitalist crisis has brought back attention to Marx’s works. This volume presents 16 contributions that show how Marx’s analyses of capitalism, the commodity, class, labour, work, exploitation, surplus-value, dialectics, crises, ideology, class struggles, and communism, help us to understand the Internet and social media in 21st century digital capitalism. Marx is back! This book is a key resource on the foundations of Marxist Internet and Digital Media Studies.