This collection of short expository, critical and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social and aesthetic impact of software. Experts from a range of disciplines each take a key topic in software and the understanding of software, such as algorithms and logical structures.
An investigation of the America-Rome analogy that goes deeper than the facile comparisons made on talk shows and in glossy magazine articles.America's post-Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq…
A symposium on condensed-phase processes at high temperatures, particularly in nonmetal systems, which presents a record of recent efforts to understand the field and apply this understanding to complex systems.
A Bradford book."The book is organized around parallel analyses of emotion and addiction in order to bring out similarities as well as differences. Elster's study sheds fresh light on the generation of human behavior, ultimately revealing how cognition, choice, and rationality are undermined by the physical processes that underlie strong emotions and cravings. This book will be of particular in…
The contributors to this book address both the pragmatic approach of direct collaboration between designers and users (known as participatory design) and the more conceptual approach that incorporates complementary perspectives to help designers come up with better solutions. The volume brings together different computer-related research disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative wor…
Does the information on the Web offer many alternative accounts of reality, or does it subtly align with an official version? In Information Politics on the Web, Richard Rogers identifies the cultures, techniques, and devices that rank and recommend information on the Web, analyzing not only the political content of Web sites but the politics built into the Web's infrastructure. Addressing the …
"How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Intern…
Silicon Valley, a small place with few identifiable geologic or geographic features, has achieved a mythical reputation in a very short time. The modern material culture of the Valley may be driven by technology, but it also encompasses architecture, transportation, food, clothing, entertainment, intercultural exchanges, and rituals.Combining a reporter's instinct for a good interview with trad…
Meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments address topics that range from pathos and genius to careerism and club sandwiches.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
This volume explores alternative cultural encounters with and around information technologies, encounters that counter dominant, Western-oriented notions of media consumption. The contributors include media practices as forms of cultural resistance and subversion, 'DIY cultures', and other non-mainstream models of technology production and consumption. The contributors - leading thinkers in sci…