Blog Theory

Author: Jodi Dean
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745659551
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications. Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj ?i?ek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system. In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchangesÑfrom blog posts to text messagesÑhave widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.

Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

Author: Jodi Dean
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390922
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies is an impassioned call for the realization of a progressive left politics in the United States. Through an assessment of the ideologies underlying contemporary political culture, Jodi Dean takes the left to task for its capitulations to conservatives and its failure to take responsibility for the extensive neoliberalization implemented during the Clinton presidency. She argues that the left’s ability to develop and defend a collective vision of equality and solidarity has been undermined by the ascendance of “communicative capitalism,” a constellation of consumerism, the privileging of the self over group interests, and the embrace of the language of victimization. As Dean explains, communicative capitalism is enabled and exacerbated by the Web and other networked communications media, which reduce political energies to the registration of opinion and the transmission of feelings. The result is a psychotic politics where certainty displaces credibility and the circulation of intense feeling trumps the exchange of reason. Dean’s critique ranges from her argument that the term democracy has become a meaningless cipher invoked by the left and right alike to an analysis of the fantasy of free trade underlying neoliberalism, and from an examination of new theories of sovereignty advanced by politicians and left academics to a look at the changing meanings of “evil” in the speeches of U.S. presidents since the mid-twentieth century. She emphasizes the futility of a politics enacted by individuals determined not to offend anyone, and she examines questions of truth, knowledge, and power in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories. Dean insists that any reestablishment of a vital and purposeful left politics will require shedding the mantle of victimization, confronting the marriage of neoliberalism and democracy, and mobilizing different terms to represent political strategies and goals.

Platforms and Cultural Production

Author: Thomas Poell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509540520
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
The widespread uptake of digital platforms – from YouTube and Instagram to Twitch and TikTok – is reconfiguring cultural production in profound, complex, and highly uneven ways. Longstanding media industries are experiencing tremendous upheaval, while new industrial formations – live-streaming, social media influencing, and podcasting, among others – are evolving at breakneck speed. Poell, Nieborg, and Duffy explore both the processes and the implications of platformization across the cultural industries, identifying key changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance at play in this ongoing transformation, as well as pivotal shifts in the practices of labor, creativity, and democracy. The authors foreground three particular industries – news, gaming, and social media creation – and also draw upon examples from music, advertising, and more. Diverse in its geographic scope, Platforms and Cultural Production builds on the latest research and accounts from across North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to reveal crucial differences and surprising parallels in the trajectories of platformization across the globe. Offering a novel conceptual framework grounded in illuminating case studies, this book is essential for students, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners seeking to understand how the institutions and practices of cultural production are transforming – and what the stakes are for understanding platform power.

The Case for a Maximum Wage

Author: Sam Pizzigati
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509524959
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
Modern societies set limits, on everything from how fast motorists can drive to how much waste factory owners can dump in our rivers. But incomes in our deeply unequal world have no limits. Could capping top incomes tackle rising inequality more effectively than conventional approaches? In this engaging book, leading analyst Sam Pizzigati details how egalitarians worldwide are demonstrating that a “maximum wage” could be both economically viable and politically practical. He shows how, building on local initiatives, governments could use their tax systems to enforce fair income ratios across the board. The ultimate goal? That ought to be, Pizzigati argues, a world without a super rich. He explains why we need to create that world — and how we could speed its creation.

Infoglut

Author: Mark Andrejevic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135119511
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Book Description
Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts," and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"—making sense of their own patterns so we don’t have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind people’s words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehension—at least for those with access to the data. Infoglut explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and "big data," and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.

Teaching William Morris

Author: Jason D. Martinek
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683930746
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
A prolific artist, writer, designer, and political activist, William Morris remains remarkably powerful and relevant today. But how do you teach someone like Morris who made significant contributions to several different fields of study? And how, within the exigencies of the modern educational system, can teachers capture the interdisciplinary spirit of Morris, whose various contributions hang so curiously together? Teaching William Morris gathers together the work of nineteen Morris scholars from a variety of fields, offering a wide array of perspectives on the challenges and the rewards of teaching William Morris. Across this book’s five sections—“Pasts and Presents,” “Political Contexts,” “Literature,” “Art and Design,” and “Digital Humanities”—readers will learn the history of Morris’s place in the modern curriculum, the current state of the field for teaching Morris’s work today, and how this pedagogical effort is reaching well beyond the college classroom.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Book Description
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Socio-Economic Development: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications

Author: Management Association, Information Resources
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1522573127
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1699

Book Description
The social and economic systems of any country are influenced by a range of factors including income and education. As such, it is vital to examine how these factors are creating opportunities to improve both the economy and the lives of people within these countries. Socio-Economic Development: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications provides a critical look at the process of social and economic transformation based on environmental and cultural factors including income, skills development, employment, and education. Highlighting a range of topics such as economics, social change, and e-governance, this multi-volume book is designed for policymakers, practitioners, city-development planners, academicians, government officials, and graduate-level students interested in emerging perspectives on socio-economic development.

Promoting Social Change and Democracy Through Information Technology

Author: Vikas Kumar
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1466685034
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
Life in the digital era offers an array of new and invigorating opportunities, as well as a new set of challenges when facing the dissemination of fresh innovations. While once reserved for personal use, online platforms are now being utilized for more critical purposes, such as ocial revolution, political influence, and governance at both the local and national levels. Promoting Social Changes and Democracy through Information Technology is a definitive reference source for the latest scholarly research on the use of the internet, mobile phones, and other digital platforms for political discourse between citizens and governments. Focusing on empirical case studies and pivotal theoretical applications of technology within political science and social activism, this comprehensive book is an essential reference source for advanced-level students, researchers, practitioners, and academicians interested in the changing landscape of democratic development and social welfare.

Researching Family Narratives

Author: Ann Phoenix
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1529735068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
This edited book guides students and researchers through the processes of researching everyday stories about families. Showcasing the wide range methods and data sources currently used in narrative research, it features: Examples of real research into historical and contemporary family practices from around the world. Coverage of both traditional and cutting-edge topics, like multi-method approaches, online research, and paradata. Practical advice from leading figures in the field on how to incorporate these methods and data sources into family narrative research. With accessible language and features that help readers reflect on and internalize key concepts, this book helps readers navigate researching family lives with confidence and ease.