Authors: Paul Virilio.
Paperback, 185 pages
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Publication Date: 2002-06-01


Reviews :

    The accident is a new form of warfare. It is replacing revolution and war. Sarajevo triggered the First World War. New York is what Sarajevo was. September 11th opened Pandora's box. The first war of globalization will be the global accident, the total accident, including the accident of science. And it is on the way.

In 1968, Virilio abandoned his work in oblique architecture, believing that time had replaced space as the most important point of reflection because of the dominance of speed.

We were basically on the verge of converting space time into space speed... Speed facilitates the decoding of the human genome, and the possibility of another humanity: a humanity which is no longer extra-territorial, but extra-human.

Crespuscular Dawn expands Virilio's vision of the implosion of physical time and space, onto the micro-level of bioengineering and biotechnology. In this cat-and-mouse dialogue between Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, Lotringer pushes Virilio to uncover the historical foundations of his biotech theories. Citing various medical experiments conducted during World War II, Lotringer asks whether biotechnology isn't the heir to eugenics and the "science for racial improvement" that the Nazis enthusiastically embraced. Will the endocolonizataion of the body come to replace the colonization of one's own population by the military?

Both biographical and thematic, the book explores the development of Virilio's investigation of space (architecture, urbanism) and time (speed and simultanaeity) that would ultimately lay the foundation for his theories on biotechnology and his startling declaration that after the colonization of space begins the colonization of the body....

Authors:
Hardcover, 260 pages
Publisher: CABI
Publication Date: 2007-12-13


Reviews :

    Climate change is one of the greatest challenges we face - both in terms of its potential impact on our societies and the earth, and the scale of international co-operation that is needed to confront it. Emerging as a component of the international dialogue on the environment and climate, the role of forests in influencing earth systems will need to be assessed. Drawing together perspectives from researchers and policy makers, this book explores how forests will interact with the physical and natural world, and with human society as the climate changes. Also considered is how the world's forests can be managed to contribute to the mitigation of climate change and to maximize the full range of economic and non-market benefits. Providing an examination of the science, a detailed consideration of the science policy interface and the international frameworks and conventions, this book is valuable reading for all those interested in sustainable forest management, climate change and the associated environmental sciences....

Authors: Esther Dyson.
Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: Broadway
Publication Date: 1997-10-13
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    Welcome to Esther Dyson's provocative and visionary new book, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.  In this eagerly anticipated book, Dyson--an entrepreneur, high-tech industry analyst, government adviser, and the "most powerful woman in the Net-erati," according to the New York Times Magazine--presents a fascinating exploration of our new digital society.  She offers a detailed view of the rapidly expanding digital environment and provides a framework that will allow all of us to think intelligently about its effect on every aspect of our private and public lives.

Written with an insider's knowledge and a ready wit, and filled with anecdotes about the movers and shakers behind both products and policy, Release 2.0 provides readers with a full understanding of the new world of cyberspace and shows how it is transforming the way we work and live.  With a perspective at once authoritative and totally accessible, she outlines the choices and questions readers face as active citizens helping to define and shape a new social contract for the digital age.  As Dyson explains, "The Net gives awesome power to individuals--the ability to be heard across the world, the ability to find information.  But with this greater ability to exercise their rights, or abuse them, individuals will need to exercise greater responsibility for their own actions and for the world they are creating."

In Release 2.0, Dyson charts the implications of the Internet for business, government, education, communities, and individuals, and illuminates the fundamental conflicts in the spread of digital communication: conflicts between personal privacy and society's interest in openness, between security and freedom, between commerce and community, between government oversight and personal autonomy, between flourishing creativity and the protection of intellectual property.

As Dyson makes clear, the digital society will bring profound shifts in the balance of power between producers and consumers, governments and citizens, the mass media and their audiences.  Now the challenge, and the opportunity, is for citizens to resolve these conflicts and trade-offs  in their own public and private communities.

Throughout, Dyson's message is prescriptive and proactive: If we want to make the world a better place, with the advent of the Internet we have both the opportunity and the power to shape the new rules we want to live by.  And, to demonstrate, Dyson shares her own short list of rules for being a citizen of the Net--from "Use your judgment," and "Ask questions" to "Be a producer" and "Always make new mistakes"--and invites each of us to create our own rules.

Lively, informative, and always challenging, Release 2.0 will speak to all readers looking to understand and design our new digital society....

    In her first book, respected digerati opinion-maker Esther Dyson looks at computing and the Internet and how they will profoundly change our business and social lives in a fully wired world. The wisdom of Dyson's view is that, while the digital age will be vastly different from the one we know, it will be governed by the same forces that have always shaped social organizations. She has given lots of thought to how those forces will interact with specific new technologies and does a convincing job of predicting the shape of things to come in considerable detail.

Dyson is the founder of the influential PC Forum conference and her company Edventure Holdings publishes the respected Release 1.0 newsletter, from which her book adapts its title. She is also chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lobbyist organization that seeks to present a pro-Internet voice in Washington....

Authors:
Paperback, 221 pages
Publisher: Hollis Publishing Company
Publication Date: 1999-04

Authors: Ollivier Dyens.
Hardcover, 134 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2001-11-01


Reviews :

    For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious, neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs, clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information symbionts.

Ollivier Dyens's Metal and Flesh is about two closely related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century—which will be remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and transformed by technology and culture—Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our lives....

    "Are we not men," bark the creatures residing in H.G. Wells's fantasy island, and cultural critic Ollivier Dyens looks into the issue in his book Metal and Flesh. Arguing that culture has redefined and even supplanted biology, he wants us to see and perhaps guide the changes we're wreaking on our bodies and the world.

Incorporating literary analysis and deft sociological synopsis, Dyens shows the reader how we have embraced technology so thoroughly that we are practically helpless without it. But ultimately, he says, our nature is still cultural, and he is surprisingly optimistic (if wary) about our lives, even if he's informed by the cyberpunk canon, Kafka, and 1984. As he says near the book's close: "We are not becoming cyborgs but sketches, pictures, writings, songs, and dances. Within us, all phenomena intermingle." Postmodern or Zen--Dyens leaves the reader with a warm, but restless, inner glow. --Rob Lightner...

Authors: C. Kramarae.
Paperback, 260 pages
Publisher: Routledge
Publication Date: 1988-02-25
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Avoiding jargon and using well-chosen illustrations, Technology and Women's Voices assesses technological changes in terms of their impact on women's social lives....

Authors: Michael J. Mazarr.
Hardcover, 384 pages
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Publication Date: 1999-06-12
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    ...

    Michael Mazarr, an adjunct researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, tries to make sense of the end of the 20th century, identifying six fundamental trends reshaping the U.S. and the world and adopting what he calls "cautious optimism" in predicting what lies ahead. While Mazarr expects little to change in the developed Western world, he predicts instability in Africa, the Middle East, and India due to rapid population growth, disease, food and water shortages, and cultural conflicts. Advances in science and technology, he continues, will fuel rapid social change and create a global culture of free-market economies--unleashing instability in the process. World economies will increasingly be based on information, reorganizing the nature of work and increasing the gap between rich and poor; the globalization of world trade, economic activity, and communication will be met by a simultaneous rise in tribalism, and Mazarr predicts the conflict between the two will be "one of the major hallmarks of the coming decade." He also projects that a transformation of authority may result in a collapse of public confidence in all social authorities, and suggests that all of these trends will result in a worldwide feeling that things have never been so good, yet also leave people decidedly negative and pessimistic about the future. The first decade of the 21st century, Mazarr writes, will see "the most profound transition in human history," a period of both opportunity and risk. "Fate has provided us with the raw material of a new renaissance in human society, but it is up to us to make that renaissance a reality." --Linda Killian ...

Authors: Arno Penzias.
Hardcover, 192 pages
Publisher: Collins
Publication Date: 1995-04-26
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    The author of Ideas and Information and director of research at Bell Labs describes the past decade's key technological developments and the resulting business transformations and discusses probable future changes in how business is conducted. National ad/promo....

Authors:
Paperback, 278 pages
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Publication Date: 1995-05

Authors: Ronald R. Kline.
Hardcover, 384 pages
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication Date: 2000-04-06
Edition: Revised

Reviews :

   

From 1900 to 1960, the introduction and development of four so-called urbanizing technologies--the telephone, automobile, radio, and electric light and power--transformed the rural United States. But did these new technologies revolutionize rural life in the ways modernizers predicted? And how exactly--and with what levels of resistance and acceptance--did this change take place? In Consumers in the Country Ronald R. Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and others who promoted these technologies and the farm families who largely succeeded in adapting them to rural culture.

...