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Why, surrounded by screens and smart devices, we feel a deep connection to the analog—vinyl records, fountain pens, Kodak film, and other nondigital tools. We’re surrounded by screens; our music comes in the form of digital files; we tap words into a notes app. Why do we still crave the “realness” of analog, seeking out vinyl records, fountain pens, cameras with film? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Robert Hassan explores our deep connection to analog technology. Our analog urge, he explains, is about what we’ve lost from our technological past, something that’s not there in our digital present. We’re nostalgic for what we remember indistinctly as so...
David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity rationalised capitalism’s transformation during an extraordinary year: 1989. It gave theoretical expression to a material and cultural reality that was just then getting properly started – globalisation and postmodernity – whilst highlighting the geo-spatial limits to accumulation imposed by our planet. However this landmark publication, author Robert Hassan argues, did not address the arrival of digital technology, the quantum leap represented by the move from an analogue world to a digital economy and the rapid creation of a global networked society. Considering first the contexts of 1989 and Harvey’s work, then the idea of humans as ...
The study of new media opens up some of the most fascinating issues in contemporary culture, bringing together key readings on new media, what it is, where it came from, how it affects our lives, and how it is managed. It encourages readers to pay attention to the 'new' in new media, as well as consider it as a historical phenomenon.
Since the late-1980s the rise of the Internet and the emergence of the Networked Society have led to a rapid and profound transformation of everyday life. Underpinning this revolution is the computer – a media technology that is capable of not only transforming itself, but almost every other machine and media process that humans have used throughout history. In Philosophy of Media, Hassan and Sutherland explore the philosophical and technological trajectory of media from Classical Greece until today, casting a new and revealing light upon the global media condition. Key topics include: the mediation of politics the question of objectivity automata and the metaphor of the machine analogue and digital technological determinism. Laid out in a clear and engaging format, Philosophy of Media provides an accessible and comprehensive exploration of the origins of the network society. It is essential reading for students of philosophy, media theory, politics, history and communication studies.
What are we to make of the information society? Many prominent theorists have argued it to be the most profound and comprehensive transformation of economy, culture and politics since the rise of the industrial way of life in the 18th century. Some saw its arrival in a positive light, where the dreams of democracy, of ‘connectivity’ and ‘efficiency’ constituted a break with the old ways. But other thinkers viewed it more in terms of the recurrent nightmare of capitalism, where the processes of exploitation, commodification and alienation are given much freer rein than ever before. In this book Robert Hassan, a prominent theorist in new media and its effects, analyses and critically appraises these positions and forms them into a coherent narrative to illuminate the phenomenon. Surveying the works of major information society theorists from Daniel Bell to Nicholas Negroponte, and from Vincent Mosco to Manuel Castells, The Information Society is an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of the information society—as well as the meta-processes of neoliberal globalisation and the revolution in information technologies that made it possible.
Connections between time, technology, and the processes of reading and writing make clear the links between experiences of what appear to be quite different phenomena. Reading and writing have functioned together in a particular way to build the world as we have known it for three thousand years. These interacting processes have now been transformed at their core and are building a different world, one where certainties of the previous era are disappearing and being displaced by what the author sees as a chronic and pervasive mode of cognitive distraction. Robert Hassan offers a perspective permeated by a sense of history, beginning with the invention of writing and the development of the sk...
24/7 is the first collection of essays dealing with the nature and our experience of temporality in the network society.
Robert howled again, and this time a single voice replied. Long, haunting sounds, beautifully modulated. They chilled Jo. Seconds later came a more distant wailing chorus. "We've got company," Robert said. "Two different groups." All three raised their binoculars. "There" said Jo, pointing. When Dr. Jo Settle, a Michigan Tech University biology professor, becomes involved with PhD student Robert Peterson, she is unaware of his scheme to steal and relocate two packs of wolves from Wisconsin to a wilderness area in West Virginia. But events quickly spin out of control, thrusting Jo from the placid groves of academe into a terrifying battle of wits and weaponry in the Appalachian coal country. ...
Drawing on current theoretical debates in journalism studies, and grounded in empirical research, Heinrich here analyzes the interplay between journalistic practice and processes of globalization and digitalization. She argues that a new kind of journalism is emerging, characterized by an increasingly global flow of news as well as a growing number of news deliverers. Within this transformed news sphere the roles of journalistic outlets change. They become nodes, arranged in a dense net of information gatherers, producers, and disseminators. The interactive connections among these news providers constitute what Heinrich calls the sphere of "network journalism."
Asynchronicity is a study of the information stress and its genesis in the accelerative dynamics of computation and automation. In simple terms, this volume illustrates how anti-democratic communication has become characteristic of our present social and political reality. This book is significant in two respects. By fully realising a general theory of social time, it advances temporal analysis as a mode of social enquiry. Grounding the production of time within the event-dynamics of media systems, it establishes a framework for analysing the temporal logics of digital media, and shows that they may be fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of democratic communication.