A philosopher considers entertainment, in all its totalizing variety—infotainment, edutainment, servotainment—and traces the notion through Kant, Zen Buddhism, Heidegger, Kafka, and Rauschenberg. In Good Entertainment, Byung-Chul Han examines the notion of entertainment—its contemporary ubiquity, and its philosophical genealogy. Entertainment today, in all its totalizing variety, has a…
A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world. New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from th…
Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful po…
Small business marketers don’t need to understand technical minutia of websites or the high-level social media strategies of national consumer brands. They need to understand how to build successful marketing machines that they can sustain with the resources they have available. This book will help small-business B2B marketers build a strong digital presence that will drive growth. Most B…
Few processes are as important for environmental geochemistry as the interplay between the oxidation and reduction of dissolved and solid species. The knowledge of the redox conditions is most important to predict the geochemical behaviour of a great number of components, the mobilities of which are directly or indirectly controlled by redox processes. The understanding of the chemical mechanis…
How the BBC shaped popular perceptions of architecture and placed them at the heart of debates over participatory democracy. In the years between the world wars, millions of people heard the world through a box on the dresser. In Britain, radio listeners relied on the British Broadcasting Corporation for information on everything from interior decoration to Hitler's rise to power. One subjec…
Sub-specialization within pediatric orthopedics is growing, in part due to the development of free-standing children's hospitals and the desire by patients and their parents to have "experts" care for them. We are at the forefront of a trend in physicians classifying themselves as pediatric upper extremity surgeons. Numerous pediatric hospitals now have or are recruiting physicians to focus the…
“U.S. Government and Politics” is a topic that in some ways needs no introduction. No matter where you come from in the world, you are probably familiar with American politics and American culture in at least some ways; this may be particularly true for Canadians, who share a border and, to some extent, a common North American culture with the USA. Yet even a deep familiarity with the daily…
What is uniquely American about American design? This first history of American products and the philosophy behind their design, use, and manufacture points to the process - the interaction between industrial technology and culture - that gave form to an American "ethic" in material products and helped shape the life style of its citizens.Pulos discusses the influences and fashions as well as t…