Technological Utopianism in American Culture
Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher:
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 9780226744384
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Technological Utopianism in American Culture
Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 2005-11-07
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 9780815630616
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFeaturing twenty-five writers in all, this book includes Howard P. Segal's acclaimed work on utopian visionaries.
Technology and Utopia
Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: Shot Historical Perspectives o
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780872291478
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSegal examines the historical connection between technology and utopia, and shows how this connection is not just a contemporary western concept, but one that stretches back several centuries.
Technological Utopianism in American Culture
Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher:
Published: 1975
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom Counterculture to Cyberculture
Author: Fred Turner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-10-15
Total Pages: 340
ISBN-13: 0226817431
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 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.
Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
Author: Nicholas Carr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-09-06
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0393254550
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA freewheeling, sharp-shooting indictment of a tech-besotted culture. With razor wit, Nicholas Carr cuts through Silicon Valley’s unsettlingly cheery vision of the technological future to ask a hard question: Have we been seduced by a lie? Gathering a decade’s worth of posts from his blog, Rough Type, as well as his seminal essays, Utopia Is Creepy is “Carr’s best hits for those who missed the last decade of his stream of thoughtful commentary about our love affair with technology and its effect on our relationships” (Richard Cytowic, New York Journal of Books). Carr draws on artists ranging from Walt Whitman to the Clash, while weaving in the latest findings from science and sociology. Carr’s favorite targets are those zealots who believe so fervently in computers and data that they abandon common sense. Cheap digital tools do not make us all the next Fellini or Dylan. Social networks, diverting as they may be, are not vehicles for self-enlightenment. And “likes” and retweets are not going to elevate political discourse. Utopia Is Creepy compels us to question the technological momentum that has trapped us in its flow. “Resistance is never futile,” argues Carr, and this book delivers the proof.
Utopias
Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2012-03-02
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 1118234405
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis brief history connects the past and present of utopian thought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up to present day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise. Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about the societies who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over the centuries Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions of utopia Explores the many forms utopias have taken – prophecies and oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physical communities – and also discusses high-tech and cyberspace visions for the first time The first book to analyze the implicitly utopian dimensions of reform crusades like Technocracy of the 1930s and Modernization Theory of the 1950s, and the laptop classroom initiatives of recent years
Transhumanism
Author: Andrew Pilsch
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2017-08-15
Total Pages: 347
ISBN-13: 1452954887
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTranshumanism posits that humanity is on the verge of rapid evolutionary change as a result of emerging technologies and increased global consciousness. However, this insight is dismissed as a naive and controversial reframing of posthumanist thought, having also been vilified as “the most dangerous idea in the world” by Francis Fukuyama. In this book, Andrew Pilsch counters these critiques, arguing instead that transhumanism’s utopian rhetoric actively imagines radical new futures for the species and its habitat. Pilsch situates contemporary transhumanism within the longer history of a rhetorical mode he calls “evolutionary futurism” that unifies diverse texts, philosophies, and theories of science and technology that anticipate a radical explosion in humanity’s cognitive, physical, and cultural potentialities. By conceptualizing transhumanism as a rhetoric, as opposed to an obscure group of fringe figures, he explores the intersection of three major paradigms shaping contemporary Western intellectual life: cybernetics, evolutionary biology, and spiritualism. In analyzing this collision, his work traces the belief in a digital, evolutionary, and collective future through a broad range of texts written by theologians and mystics, biologists and computer scientists, political philosophers and economic thinkers, conceptual artists and Golden Age science fiction writers. Unearthing the long history of evolutionary futurism, Pilsch concludes, allows us to more clearly see the novel contributions that transhumanism offers for escaping our current geopolitical bind by inspiring radical utopian thought.
Future Imperfect
Author: Howard P. Segal
Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Press
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780870238826
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a series of case studies, Howard P. Segal reconsiders the American ideology of technological progress and its legacy for our contemporary high-tech world. He offers concrete examples - drawn from United States history, literature, and museums - of the role of technology in American life and the complex relationship between technological advances and social developments. In each instance, he finds technology neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but rather a mixed blessing.
The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2024-05-16
Total Pages: 331
ISBN-13: 1009188216
DOWNLOAD EBOOKProviding a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking about how to create a better world through daily practices of generosity, justice, and care. The chapters collected here emphasize utopianism as a practice of social transformation, not as a literary genre depicting a putatively perfect society, and urgently make the case for why we need utopian thought today. With chapters on climate change, economic justice, technology, and more, alongside chapters exploring utopian traditions outside Western frameworks, this book opens a new discussion in utopian thought and theory.
