Two Bits
Two Bits

Author: Christopher M. Kelty

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-06-09

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 9780822342649

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

Cultural Software
Cultural Software

Author: J. M. Balkin

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780300084504

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book J. M. Balkin offers a strikingly original theory of cultural evolution, a theory that explains shared understandings, disagreement, and diversity within cultures. Drawing on many fields of study--including anthropology, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology, and law--the author explores how cultures grow and spread, how shared understandings arise, and how people of different cultures can understand and evaluate each other's views. Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural information and know-how--cultural software--in human minds, Balkin says. Individuals embody cultural software and spread it to others through communication and social learning. Ideology, the author contends, is neither a special nor a pathological form of thought but an ordinary product of the evolution of cultural software. Because cultural understanding is a patchwork of older imperfect tools that are continually adapted to solve new problems, human understanding is partly adequate and partly inadequate to the pursuit of justice. Balkin presents numerous examples that illuminate the sources of ideological effects and their contributions to injustice. He also enters the current debate over multiculturalism, applying his theory to problems of mutual understanding between people who hold different worldviews. He argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals and shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible.

Culture in Networks
Culture in Networks

Author: Paul McLean

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0745687202

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Today, interest in networks is growing by leaps and bounds, in both scientific discourse and popular culture. Networks are thought to be everywhere – from the architecture of our brains to global transportation systems. And networks are especially ubiquitous in the social world: they provide us with social support, account for the emergence of new trends and markets, and foster social protest, among other functions. Besides, who among us is not familiar with Facebook, Twitter, or, for that matter, World of Warcraft, among the myriad emerging forms of network-based virtual social interaction? It is common to think of networks simply in structural terms – the architecture of connections among objects, or the circuitry of a system. But social networks in particular are thoroughly interwoven with cultural things, in the form of tastes, norms, cultural products, styles of communication, and much more. What exactly flows through the circuitry of social networks? How are people's identities and cultural practices shaped by network structures? And, conversely, how do people's identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the network structures they create? This book is designed to help readers think about how and when culture and social networks systematically penetrate one another, helping to shape each other in significant ways.

The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader
The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader

Author: Jennifer Scanlon

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2000-08

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0814781314

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this consumer culture studies anthology, 23 reprinted essays (1934-98) consider both the empowering and disempowering elements of consumerism. In her introduction, Scanlon (women's studies, Plattsburgh State U. of New York) views consumer culture as a collaborative process, not simply a matter of perpetrators and victims. The themes the essays address are: stretching the boundaries of the domestic sphere; you are what you buy; the message makers; and sexuality, pleasure and resistance in consumer culture. The book features bandw illustrations promoting the cults of domesticity and identity through proper consumption. It lacks an index. c. Book News Inc.

Media, Communication, Culture
Media, Communication, Culture

Author: James Lull

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780231120739

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"For this new edition coverage has been expanded from six to eleven chapters, and has been thoroughly updated to include all new developments in the field."--BOOK JACKET.

Understanding Intercultural Communication
Understanding Intercultural Communication

Author: Adrian Holliday

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-10

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1351139509

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Understanding Intercultural Communication provides a practical framework to help readers to understand intercultural communication and to solve intercultural problems. Each chapter exemplifies the everyday intercultural through ethnographic narratives in which people make sense of each other in home, work and study locations. Underpinned by a grammar of culture developed by the author, this book addresses key issues in intercultural communication, including: the positive contribution of people from diverse cultural backgrounds; the politics of Self and Other which promote negative stereotyping; the basis for a de-centred approach to globalisation in which periphery cultural realities can gain voice and ownership. Written by a leading researcher in the field, the new edition of this important text has been revised to invite the reader to reflect and develop their own intercultural and research strategies, and updated to include new ideas that have emerged in Holliday’s own work and elsewhere. This book is a key resource for academics, students and practitioners in intercultural communication and related fields.

Blown to Bits
Blown to Bits

Author: Harold Abelson

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0137135599

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Blown to Bits' is about how the digital explosion is changing everything. The text explains the technology, why it creates so many surprises and why things often don't work the way we expect them to. It is also about things the information explosion is destroying: old assumptions about who is really in control of our lives.

Culture and Society
Culture and Society

Author: David Oswell

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2006-12-07

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1847877532

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Too often cultural studies discourse seems cut off from wider developments in social theory. As a sociologist with a strong cultural studies sensibility, David Oswell is ideally placed to put this right. Through a series of well-judged and historically nuanced readings of cultural, social theory and critical philosophy, this book provides just the bridge between cultural studies and wider debates that we need" - Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science David Oswell has written a comprehensive introduction to cultural studies that guides the reader through the field′s central foundations and its freshest ideas. This book: Grounds the reader in the foundations of cultural studies and cultural theory: language and semiology, ideology and power, mass and popular culture. Analyzes the central problems: identity, body, economy, globalization and empire. Introduces the latest developments on materiality, agency, technology and nature. Culture and Society is an invaluable guide for students navigating the dynamic debates and intellectual challenges of cultural studies. Its breadth and unparalleled coverage of theory will also ensure that it is read by anyone interested in questions of materiality and culture.