Imaginaries of Connectivity

Imaginaries of Connectivity PDF Author: Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786611384
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This edited collection addresses the problem of how the creation of novel spaces of governance relates to imaginaries of connectivity in time. While connectivity seems almost ubiquitous today, it has been imagined and practiced in various ways and to varying political effects in different historical and geographical contexts. Often the conception of new connectivities also gives birth to new spaces of governance. The political denomination of spaces – whether maritime, continental, social, or virtual – reflects the situatedness of power. Yet, such crafting of new spaces also expresses particular imaginaries and technologies of connectivity that make governance possible. Whereas the study of international relations has traditionally focused on the role of agency and structure in power relations, the affects, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that intervene in how groups of people connect in given times have not attracted much scholarly attention Overall, the detailed and original case studies examined in the book range from the 16th century, to the 19th century, to the present, and from Spain, to the Maritime Alps, to Germany, to the Mediterranean, to China, to East Asia. The historical and geographical variety of the cases serves to highlight the diversity of the meaning and function of connectivity in the constitution of novel spaces of governance.

Imaginaries of Connectivity

Imaginaries of Connectivity PDF Author: Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786611384
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
This edited collection addresses the problem of how the creation of novel spaces of governance relates to imaginaries of connectivity in time. While connectivity seems almost ubiquitous today, it has been imagined and practiced in various ways and to varying political effects in different historical and geographical contexts. Often the conception of new connectivities also gives birth to new spaces of governance. The political denomination of spaces – whether maritime, continental, social, or virtual – reflects the situatedness of power. Yet, such crafting of new spaces also expresses particular imaginaries and technologies of connectivity that make governance possible. Whereas the study of international relations has traditionally focused on the role of agency and structure in power relations, the affects, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that intervene in how groups of people connect in given times have not attracted much scholarly attention Overall, the detailed and original case studies examined in the book range from the 16th century, to the 19th century, to the present, and from Spain, to the Maritime Alps, to Germany, to the Mediterranean, to China, to East Asia. The historical and geographical variety of the cases serves to highlight the diversity of the meaning and function of connectivity in the constitution of novel spaces of governance.

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond

Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond PDF Author: Philipp Schorch
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787357481
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theoretical perspective; taking the suggestion of 'thinking through things' literally and methodologically seriously, the first two workshops were dedicated to practical, hands-on exercises working with things. From these workshops a series of installations emerged, straddling the boundaries of art and academia. These installations served as artistic-academic interventions during the final symposium and are featured alongside the other academic contributions to this volume. Throughout this process, two main themes emerged and structure Part II, Movement and Growth, and Part III, Dissolution and Traces, of the present volume, respectively. Part I, Conceptual Grounds, consists of two chapters offering conceptual takes on things and ties – one from anthropology and one from archaeology. As interrelated modes of becoming, materiality and connectivity make it necessary to coalesce things and ties into thing~ties – an insight toward which the chapters and interventions came from different sides, and one in which the initial proposition of the editors still shines through. Throughout the pages of this volume, we invite the reader to travel beyond imaginaries of a universe of separate planets united by connections, and to venture with us instead into the thicket of thing~ties in which we live.

Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires

Mapping, Connectivity, and the Making of European Empires PDF Author: Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153814641X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
This volume seeks to collectively explore how maps can be used to understand the making of European empires, how the epistemological practices embedded in them can be approached to understand European imperial space-making, and how maps can be seen as representations of imaginaries of connectivity. Rehearsing mapping’s past and its multifarious relations with European imperial orders is not merely an historical exercise to contribute to a global history of cartography. What binds the several interventions is rather an awareness that looking at a particular moment of the past with composite methodologies and interdisciplinary gazes may harbour potential discoveries on the context-embedded relations between mapping, connectivity, and European empire to which we are not yet attuned. By exploring the imaginaries of the world in the mapping of Western modern empires, the book also links to the burgeoning literature on the history of international relations and empire. The emphasis on empires serves here as an important corrigendum for IR’s state centrism and Eurocentrism and contributes to further erode the myth of Westphalia.

Undoing Networks

Undoing Networks PDF Author: Tero Karppi
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452959749
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Exploring and conceptualizing practices, technologies, and politics of disconnecting How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: “digital detox” is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life. Self-help books advocate “digital minimalism” to recover authentic experiences of the offline. Artists envision a world without the internet. Activists mobilize against the expansion of the 5G network. If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores nonusage and the “right to disconnect” from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism.

The Internet Myth

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

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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.

Imagining the Internet

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

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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.

Shifting Social Imaginaries in the Hellenistic Period

Shifting Social Imaginaries in the Hellenistic Period PDF Author: Eftychia Stavrianopoulou
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004257993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
There is a long tradition in classical scholarship of reducing the Hellenistic period to the spreading of Greek language and culture far beyond the borders of the Mediterranean. More than anything else this perception has hindered an appreciation of the manifold consequences triggered by the creation of new spaces of connectivity linking different cultures and societies in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. In adopting a new approach this volume explores the effects of the continuous adaptations of ideas and practices to new contexts of meaning on the social imaginaries of the parties participating in these intercultural encounters. The essays show that the seemingly static end-products of the interaction between Greek and non-Greek groups, such as texts, images, and objects, were embedded in long-term discourses, and thus subject to continuously shifting processes.

Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity

Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity PDF Author: Roland Robertson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134803273
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
The current discourse of globalization is overwhelmingly centred upon the interconnectedness, or connectivity, of the contemporary world; to the great neglect of the issues of global culture and global consciousness. With contemporary worldwide culture increasingly characterized by such themes as astronomy, cosmology, space travel and exploration, there is an increasing disjuncture between academic concern with connectivity, on the one hand, and culture and consciousness of the place of planet earth in the cosmos as a whole, on the other. This book addresses this deficiency from a variety of closely related perspectives, presenting studies of religion, science, sport, international organizations, global resistance movements and migrations and developments in East Asia. It brings together the latest theoretical empirical work from scholars in the US, UK, Australia, Japan, China and Israel on the significance of culture and global consciousness. As such, Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity will be of great interest to scholars across and beyond the social sciences working in the areas of global studies, cultural studies, social theory, the sociology of religion and related issues.

When the Medium Was the Mission

When the Medium Was the Mission PDF Author: Jenna Supp-Montgomerie
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479801496
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
**FINALIST, 2022 PROSE Award in Theology & Religious Studies** An innovative exploration of religion's influence on communication networks When Samuel Morse sent the words “what hath God wrought” from the US Supreme Court to Baltimore in mere minutes, it was the first public demonstration of words travelling faster than human beings and farther than a line of sight in the US. This strange confluence of media, religion, technology, and US nationhood lies at the foundation of global networks. The advent of a telegraph cable crossing the Atlantic Ocean was viewed much the way the internet is today, to herald a coming world-wide unification. President Buchanan declared that the Atlantic Telegraph would be “an instrument destined by divine providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world” through which “the nations of Christendom [would] spontaneously unite.” Evangelical Protestantism embraced the new technology as indicating God’s support for their work to Christianize the globe. Public figures in the US imagined this new communication technology in primarily religious terms as offering the means to unite the world and inspire peaceful relations among nations. Religious utopianists saw the telegraph as the dawn of a perfect future. Religious framing thus dominated the interpretation of the technology’s possibilities, forging an imaginary of networks as connective, so much so that connection is now fundamental to the idea of networks. In reality, however, networks are marked, at core, by disconnection. With lively historical sources and an accessible engagement with critical theory, When the Medium was the Mission tells the story of how connection was made into the fundamental promise of networks, illuminating the power of public Protestantism in the first network imaginaries, which continue to resonate today in false expectations of connection.

Salvadoran Imaginaries

Salvadoran Imaginaries PDF Author: Cecilia M. Rivas
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813571839
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Ravaged by civil war throughout the 1980s and 1990s, El Salvador has now emerged as a study in contradictions. It is a country where urban call centers and shopping malls exist alongside rural poverty. It is a land now at peace but still grappling with a legacy of violence. It is a place marked by deep social divides, yet offering a surprising abundance of inclusive spaces. Above all, it is a nation without borders, as widespread emigration during the war has led Salvadorans to develop a truly transnational sense of identity. In Salvadoran Imaginaries, Cecilia M. Rivas takes us on a journey through twenty-first century El Salvador and to the diverse range of sites where the nation’s postwar identity is being forged. Combining field ethnography with media research, Rivas deftly toggles between the physical spaces where the new El Salvador is starting to emerge and the virtual spaces where Salvadoran identity is being imagined, including newspapers, literature, and digital media. This interdisciplinary approach enables her to explore the multitude of ways that Salvadorans negotiate between reality and representation, between local neighborhoods and transnational imagined communities, between present conditions and dreams for the future. Everyday life in El Salvador may seem like a simple matter, but Rivas digs deeper, across many different layers of society, revealing a wealth of complex feelings that the nation’s citizens have about power, opportunity, safety, migration, and community. Filled with first-hand interviews and unique archival research, Salvadoran Imaginaries offers a fresh take on an emerging nation and its people.