With a Foreword by Dr. Fishwick's student--Tom Wolfe.
This book redefines popular culture in the light of the revolutionary changes brought about by the information revolution and the digital divide. ...It explores the phenomenal growth and extension of popular culture in the last decade and ties in the vast changes brought about by technology and the Internet. In an era when American television and the Internet reach virtually every corner of the globe, Popular Culture in a New Age shows how the poorly understood and often underestimated area known as popular culture affects all of our lives.
Beginning with an evaluation of the millennium celebrations and the enormous error of Y2K madness, Popular Culture in a New Age then moves on to the "New Gold Rush" brought about by technology and takes a hard look at its risks. The book examines a wide variety of pop culture phenomena such as carnivals, celebrities, and the road from nineteenth century humbuggery (P. T. Barnum's term) to today's hype.
In Popular Culture in a New Age you'll learn about:
the three faces of popular culture: folk, fake, and pop--how they relate and how they differ
today's popular icons
the empire of Disney World
Marshall McLuhan, our era's most profound and shocking electronic thinker
African-American popular culture and style Popular Culture in a New Age gives characterization to the postmodern world in a chapter on "postmodern pop," followed by the shift from civil religion to civil disobedience and the "myth of success." This insightful book will help you understand the way we eat, think, vote, and respond to our fast-changing world in the era of hype, spin doctors, chat rooms, and jargon.
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Millennium Merrymaking
What to Make of the Millennium
Popular Culture: The Beggar at the Gate of Our Public Schools
The New Gold Rush
Folk/Fake/Pop
Sacred Symbols
The Man and the Mouse
Carnivals--Old and New
The Celebrity Cult
From Humbuggery to Hype
Surprise Attacks
The Electric Shocker
Style
Black Popular Culture
The Most Popular War
Postmodern Pop
Faith Takes a New Face
The Most Popular Myth
Global Village--Utopia Revisited?
Some Final Thoughts
Notes
Further Reading
Index
Reference Notes Included
Technology as Human Social Tradition outlines a novel approach to studying variability and cumulative change in human technology—prominent research themes in both archaeology and anthropology. Peter ...Jordan argues that human material culture is best understood as an expression of social tradition. In this approach, each artifact stands as an output of a distinctive operational sequence with specific choices made at each stage in its production. Jordan also explores different material culture traditions that are propagated through social learning, factors that promote coherent lineages of tradition to form, and the extent to which these cultural lineages exhibit congruence with one another and with language history. Drawing on the application of cultural transmission theory to empirical research, Jordan develops a descent-with-modification perspective on the technology of Northern Hemisphere hunter-gatherers. Case studies from indigenous societies in Northwest Siberia, the Pacific Northwest Coast, and Northern California provide cross-cultural insights related to the evolution of material culture traditions at different social and spatial scales. This book promises new ways of exploring some of the primary factors that generate human cultural diversity in the deep past and through to the present.
This book argues that identity and money are both changing profoundly. Because of technological change the two trends are converging so that all that we need for transacting will be our identities ...captured in the unique record of our online social contacts. Social networks and mobile phones are the key technologies. They will enable the building of an identity infrastructure that can enhance both privacy and security - there is no trade-off. The long-term consequences of these changes are impossible to predict, partly because how they take shape will depend on how companies take advantage of business opportunities to deliver transaction services. But one prediction made here is that cash will soon be redundant - and a good thing too. In its place we will see a proliferation of new digital currencies.
The twentieth century saw many revolutions. Various transformations in the political, economic, social, technological and artistic domains not only inaugurated new eras, or at least discourses about ...new eras; they also often entailed a radical reorientation in the very conceptions by which any revolution could be thought. This beautifully edited collection of essays addresses itself to the particular revolution by which we came to understand the unity of space and time as ontological categories. The twelve papers collected in this volume explore the consequences of conceptions of time and its relationship to space. Although originating from the revolution in mathematics and theoretical physics, these essays extend the thinking of space-time in a multi-disciplinary approach through the philosophy of space and time, social geography, post-Marxian social theory, new network theory, the philosophy of art and culture, musicology, evolutionary biology, historiography, psychoanalytic theory, and comparative literature. The result is a fascinating snapshot of a nearly universal transformation, but one that was only slowly realized, as the debates in one field reverberated across a vast terrain of discourse and discipline. In tracing the varied responses to the developments emanating from theoretical physics, the essays in this volume reveal how discontinuous but profound shifts in knowledge and aesthetics ultimately converge on a radically transformed horizon. Contributors are: Peter Galison, Richard T. W. Arthur, Nader El-Bizri, Chunglin Kwa, Leslie Kavanaugh, Mary Lynne Ellis, Patricia Locke, Sander van Maas, Raviv Ganchrow, Josef Früchtl, M. Christine Boyer, and Antoine Picon.
In this unique, enlightening monograph, Toivo Koivukoski explores the circumstances that have led modern society to use the concept of progress as a surrogate cosmology that gives individuals a sense ...of place and purpose. By linking various historical paradigms from German Idealist philosophy to contemporary philosophies of technology, this work of political theory describes an alternative, immanent pattern of development that is, in a sense, driven by its own unintended consequences. The meditations outlined within this book map out the hypertext pathways of our global system, making its constitutive relations and underlying thought processes transparent. Koivukoski mirrors the new hyper-realities of electronic communications technologies by structuring the text in compact subchapters that are linked through an index of subjects that allows readers to "find their own philosophy" by jumping to areas of interest. If, as he argues, history understood in a linear, lockstep fashion is over, then the ways of developing concepts should change respectively so that the sorts of retrievals, anticipations, loops, and leaps that characterize nonlinear, networked thinking are consciously realized in an identity of form and substance.
The Fantasy Factoryexplores the world of women on the other end of the phone sex lines advertised in magazines like Playboy and Hustler. The author's interviews with these women, as well as her own ...first-hand experiences as an operator, reveal the complex ways operators and callers negotiate the shifting borders between desire and disgust, fantasy and reality, deception and belief.The Fantasy Factoryraises provocative questions about the manufacture of artificial intimacy and the technological mediation of intimacy, as well as about the social construction of sexuality and gender. Flowers discovers that operators-who assume names like Tiffany and Corvette-create a virtual reality in which callers can act out fantasies that operators may find boring, disgusting, or even frightening. She also discovers that even those women who are skilled at keeping their "true self" and their phone sex persona separate find that they have to struggle to protect that self and to maintain the ability to experience real intimacy.
Mobile Modernity Presner, Todd
2007., 20070419, 2007, 2012-07-16, 20070101
eBook
Though the history of the German railway system is often associated with the transportation of Jews to labor and death camps, Todd Presner looks instead to the completion of the first German railway ...lines and their role in remapping the cultural geography and intellectual history of Germany's Jews. Treating the German railway as both an iconic symbol of modernity and a crucial social, technological, and political force, Presner advances a groundbreaking interpretation of the ways in which mobility is inextricably linked to German and Jewish visions of modernity. Moving beyond the tired model of a failed German-Jewish dialogue, Presner emphasizes the mutual entanglement of the very categories of German and Jewish and the many sites of contact and exchange that occurred between German and Jewish thinkers. Turning to philosophy, literature, and the history of technology, and drawing on transnational cultural and diaspora studies, Presner charts the influence of increased mobility on interactions between Germans and Jews. He considers such major figures as Kafka, Heidegger, Arendt, Freud, Sebald, Hegel, and Heine, reading poetry next to philosophy, architecture next to literature, and railway maps next to cultural history. Rather than a conventional, linear history that culminates in the tragedy of the Holocaust, Presner produces a cultural mapping that articulates a much more complex story of the hopes and catastrophes of mobile modernity. By focusing on the spaces of encounter emblematically represented by the overdetermined triangulation of Germans, Jews, and trains, he introduces a new genealogy for the study of European and German-Jewish modernity.
How technological change in the West has been driven by the pursuit of improvement: a history of technology, from plows and printing presses to penicillin, the atomic bomb, and the computer.
This book examines peak oil in the larger context of human ecology. Greer sees peak oil as a result of historical trends that will continue to evolve for centuries. He advocates consciously ...maximizing creative approaches to address this global challenge.
