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.

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

Get Book Here

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

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


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.

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.

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.

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.

Astrofuturism

Astrofuturism PDF Author: De Witt Douglas Kilgore
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space is the first full-scale analysis of an aesthetic, scientific, and political movement that sought the amelioration of racial difference and social antagonisms through the conquest of space. Drawing on the popular science writing and science fiction of an eclectic group of scientists, engineers, and popular writers, De Witt Douglas Kilgore investigates how the American tradition of technological utopianism responded to the political upheavals of the twentieth century. Founded in the imperial politics and utopian schemes of the nineteenth century, astrofuturism envisions outer space as an endless frontier that offers solutions to the economic and political problems that dominate the modern world. Its advocates use the conventions of technological and scientific conquest to consolidate or challenge the racial and gender hierarchies codified in narratives of exploration. Because the icon of space carries both the imperatives of an imperial past and the democratic hopes of its erstwhile subjects, its study exposes the ideals and contradictions endemic to American culture. Kilgore argues that in the decades following the Second World War the subject of race became the most potent signifier of political crisis for the predominantly white and male ranks of astrofuturism. In response to criticism inspired by the civil rights movement and the new left, astrofuturists imagined space frontiers that could extend the reach of the human species and heal its historical wounds. Their work both replicated dominant social presuppositions and supplied the resources necessary for the critical utopian projects that emerged from the antiracist, socialist, and feminist movements of the twentieth century. This survey of diverse bodies of literature conveys the dramatic and creative syntheses that astrofuturism envisions between people and machines, social imperatives and political hope, physical knowledge and technological power. Bringing American studies, utopian literature, popular conceptions of race and gender, and the cultural study of science and technology into dialogue, Astrofuturism will provide scholars of American culture, fans of science fiction, and readers of science writing with fresh perspectives on both canonical and cutting-edge astrofuturist visions.

Future Imperfect

Future Imperfect PDF Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In a series of case studies, Howard P. Segal reconsiders the American ideology of technological progress and its legacy for our contemporary high-tech world. He offers concrete examples - drawn from United States history, literature, and museums - of the role of technology in American life and the complex relationship between technological advances and social developments. In each instance, he finds technology neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but rather a mixed blessing.

Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia

Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia PDF Author: Nathaniel Robert Walker
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198861443
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
A study of British and American Utopian writing of the 1800s in the context of developments in real architectural, political, and cultural life. The book studies utopian visions published in the UK and the USA in the 1800s by writers such Robert Owen, James Silk Buckingham, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris.

New Directions in American Reception Study

New Directions in American Reception Study PDF Author: Philip Goldstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190295694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Contemporary reception study has developed a diversity of approaches and methods, including the institutional, textual, historical, authorial, and reader-response, which, to a greater or lesser extent, acknowledge the various ways in which readers have found texts-- literature, television shows, movies, and newspapers--meaningful. This collection emphasizes that new diversity, examining movies, newspapers, fans, television shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic, Black, and Women's literature. The essays on literature include James Machor on Melville's short fiction, Kenneth Roemer on Edward Bellamy's utopian work Looking Backward, Amy Blair on the popularity of Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, Marcial Gonzalez on Danny Santiago and his Hispanic novel Famous All Over Town, and Leonard Diepeveen on modernist fiction and criticism. The theoretical essays on reader-oriented criticism include Patsy Schweickart on interpretation and the ethics of careand Jack Bratich on active audiences. Media versions of response criticism include Andrea Press and Camille Johnson's ethnographic analysis of fans of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Janet Staiger on Robert Aldrich's film version of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly, and Rhiannon Bury on the fans of the HBO television show Six Feet Under. History-of-the-book versions include Barbara Hochman on the popularity of the 1890s editions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ellen Garvey on nineteenth-century scrapbooks of newspaper, and David Nord on early twentieth-century newspapers' relations to audience charges of bias and unfairness. Poststructuralist studies include Philip Goldstein on Richard Wright's Native Son, Steve Mailloux on Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Tony Bennett on the cultural analyses of Pierre Bourdieu. The collection concludes with essays by Janice Radway on the limits of these methods and on the possibility of new forms of sociological and anthropological reception study and byToby Miller on the "reception deception" in relation to the worldwide distribution and reception of movies and television shows.