From Counterculture to Cyberculture
From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Author: Fred Turner

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-10-15

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0226817431

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In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

Disinformation Book of Lists
Disinformation Book of Lists

Author: Russ Kick

Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser

Published: 2004-06-01

Total Pages: 494

ISBN-13: 1609258894

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Can you name five military leaders who were transgendered? Twelve cases of involuntary human experimentation by the U.S. government? How about the four porn novels written by famous authors, 11 books left out of the Bible and over 50 side effects of NutraSweet that have been reported to the FDA? In 1977, David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace published The Book of Lists, causing an immediate sensation. Not only did it lead to three direct sequels (in 1980, 1983 and 1993), it also created a new genre. Soon, shelves were lined with The First Original Unexpurgated Authentic Canadian Book of Lists (1978), The Book of Sports Lists (1979) and Meredith’s Book of Bible Lists (1980), among many others. Using this popular, enduring format, Russ Kick’s Disinformation Book of Lists delves into the murkier aspects of politics, current events, business, history, science, art and literature, sex, drugs, death and more. Despite such unusual subject matter, this book presents hard, substantiated facts with full references. Among the lists presented: Innocent People Freed from Prison Members of the Skull & Bones Secret Society at Yale Drugs Pulled Off the Market After They Killed Too Many People Legal Substances that Will Get You High Scenes that Were Cut from Movies Raunchy Songs that Were Never Released Military Officers, Government Officials, Astronauts, and Airline Personnel Who Say UFOs Are Real Words and Phrases No Longer Allowed in Textbooks

The Net Effect
The Net Effect

Author: Thomas Streeter

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0814741169

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"This book about America's romance with computer communication looks at the Internet, not as a harbinger of the future or the next big thing, but as an expression of the times. Streeter demonstrates that our ideas about what connected computers are for have been in constant flux since their invention. In the 1950s they were imagined as the means for fighting nucelar wars, in the 1960s as systems for bringing mathematical certainty to the messy complexity of social life, in the 1970s as countercultural playgrounds, in the 1980s as an icon for what's good about free markets, in the 1990s as a new frontier to be conquered, and, by the late 1990s, as the transcendence of markets in an anarchist open source utopia. The Net Effect teases out how culture has influenced the construction of the internet and how the structure of the internet has played a role in cultures of social and political thought." -- cover.

The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef
The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef

Author: Daniel J. Philippon

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2024-08-15

Total Pages: 573

ISBN-13: 0813952026

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The role of food writing in the sustainable food movement At turns heartfelt and witty, accessible and engaging, The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef explores how Wendell Berry, Carlo Petrini, and Alice Waters have changed America’s relationship with food over the past fifty years. Daniel Philippon weighs the legacy of each of these writers and activists while planting and harvesting vegetables in central Wisconsin, speaking with growers and food producers in northern Italy, and visiting with chefs and restaurateurs in southeastern France. Following Berry, Petrini, and Waters in pursuit of his own “ideal meal,” Philippon considers what a sustainable food system might look like and what role writing can play in making it a reality. Warning of the dangers of “agristalgia,” Philippon instead advocates for a diverse set of practices he calls “elemental cooking,” which would define sustainable food from farm to table, while also acknowledging the importance of seeking social justice throughout the food system. A rigorous yet generous appraisal of three central figures in the sustainable food movement, The Farmer, the Gastronome, and the Chef demonstrates how the written word has the power to change our world for the better, one ideal meal at a time.

Counterculture Green
Counterculture Green

Author: Andrew G. Kirk

Publisher: Goodman Publishers

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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For many, it was more than a publication: it was a way of life. The Whole Earth Catalog billed itself as "Access to Tools, " and it grew from a Bay Area blip to a national phenomenon catering to hippies, do-it-yourselfers, and anyone interested in self-sufficiency independent of mainstream America (now known as "living off the grid"). In recovering the history of the Catalog's unique brand of environmentalism, historian Kirk recounts how Stewart Brand and the Point Foundation promoted a philosophy of pragmatic environmentalism that celebrated technological achievement, human ingenuity, and sustainable living. Kirk shows us that Whole Earth was more than a mere counterculture fad. At a time when many of these ideas were seen as heretical to a predominantly wilderness-based movement, it became a critical forum for environmental alternatives and a model for how complicated ecological ideas could be presented in a hopeful and even humorous way.--From publisher description.

Digressions in Deep Time
Digressions in Deep Time

Author: Declan Lloyd

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-06-18

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 166694842X

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“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in particular: that deep time thinking and ecocriticism should be considered in conjunction, and that literature and the arts play a vital role in fostering a deep time awareness. Digressions in Deep Time is the first collection of essays which considers the multifarious representations of deep time across literature and the arts, assembling the work of a wide range of prominent scholars whose research frequently engages with temporality and ecocriticism. Featured contributions include work by the Pulitzer-prize winning author John McPhee, who popularised the term deep time in the late seventies, as well as chapters by Richard Irvine (author of An Anthropology of Deep Time), Benjamin Morgan (author of The Outward Mind) and Andrew Tate (author of Apocalyptic Fiction).

American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War
American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War

Author: Steven Belletto

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2012-10-01

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1609381440

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The time is right for a critical reassessment of Cold War culture both because its full cultural impact remains unprocessed and because some of the chief paradigms for understanding that culture confuse rather than clarify. A collection of the work of some of the best cultural critics writing about the period, American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War reveals a broad range of ways that American cultural production from the late 1940s to the present might be understood in relation to the Cold War. Critically engaging the reigning paradigms that equate postwar U.S. culture with containment culture, the authors present suggestive revisionist claims. Their essays draw on a literary archive—including the works of John Updike, Joan Didion, Richard E. Kim, Allen Ginsberg, Edwin Denby, Alice Childress, Frank Herbert, and others—strikingly different from the one typically presented in accounts of the period. Likewise, the authors describe phenomena—such as the FBI’s surveillance of writers (especially African Americans), biopolitics, development theory, struggles over the centralization and decentralization of government, and the cultural work of Reaganism—that open up new contexts for discussing postwar culture. Extending the timeline and expanding the geographic scope of Cold War culture, this book reveals both the literature and the culture of the time to be more dynamic and complex than has been generally supposed.

Video Methods
Video Methods

Author: Charlotte Bates

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-04

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1317859758

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This interdisciplinary collection provides a set of innovative and inventive approaches to the use of video as a research method. Building on the development of visual methods across the social sciences, it highlights a range of possibilities for making and working with video data. The collection showcases different video methods, including video diaries, video go-alongs, time-lapse video, mobile devices, multi-angle video recording, video ethnography, and ethnographic documentary. Each method is presented through a case study, showing how it can be used in practice. The authors offer pragmatic advice and discuss practical issues, including equipment, techniques and skills, analysis, and presentation. They also show how video methods can be used in a range of different contexts – at train stations, on bicycles, in schools, outdoors, and in museums – to investigate worlds that are visible, audible, tangible, and in motion. In doing so, they illuminate the theoretical possibilities that video methods offer for researching the body, identity, everyday life, affect, time, and space.