Technological Utopianism in American Culture

Technological Utopianism in American Culture PDF Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226744360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description

Technological Utopianism in American Culture

Technological Utopianism in American Culture PDF Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226744360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description


Technological Utopianism in American Culture

Technological Utopianism in American Culture PDF Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815630616
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Featuring twenty-five writers in all, this book includes Howard P. Segal's acclaimed work on utopian visionaries.

Technology and Utopia

Technology and Utopia PDF Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: Shot Historical Perspectives o
ISBN: 9780872291478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Segal examines the historical connection between technology and utopia, and shows how this connection is not just a contemporary western concept, but one that stretches back several centuries.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations PDF Author: Nicholas Carr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393254550
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.

Utopias

Utopias PDF Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118234405
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This brief history connects the past and present of utopian thought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up to present day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise. Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about the societies who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over the centuries Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions of utopia Explores the many forms utopias have taken – prophecies and oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physical communities – and also discusses high-tech and cyberspace visions for the first time The first book to analyze the implicitly utopian dimensions of reform crusades like Technocracy of the 1930s and Modernization Theory of the 1950s, and the laptop classroom initiatives of recent years

From Counterculture to Cyberculture

From Counterculture to Cyberculture PDF Author: Fred Turner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226817431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945

The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945 PDF Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009188216
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.

American Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination

American Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination PDF Author: Susan M. Matarese
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
ISBN: 9781558497702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
An innovative look at the cultural roots of American foreign policy.

Systemic Innovation

Systemic Innovation PDF Author: Dimitri Uzunidis
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119779383
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description


The Romantic Machine

The Romantic Machine PDF Author: John Tresch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226812227
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
In the years immediately following Napoleon’s defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment’s emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society. Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today. Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, The Romantic Machine is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.