The Arbiters of Reality
The Arbiters of Reality

Author: Peter West

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13:

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The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture disrupts our critical sense of nineteenth-century American literature by examining the storytelling strategies of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in light of an emerging information industry. Peter West reveals how these writers invoked telegraphic and penny press journalism, daguerreotypy, and moving panoramas in their fiction to claim for themselves a privileged access to a reality beyond the reach of a burgeoning mass audience. Locating Hawthorne and Melville in vivid and overlooked contexts--the Salem Murder scandal of 1830, which transformed Hawthorne's quiet city into a media-manufactured spectacle, and Melville's New York City of 1846-47, where the American Telegraph was powerfully articulating a nation at war--West portrays the romance as a reactive, deeply rhetorical literary form and a rich historical artifact. In the early twenty-first century, it has become a postmodern cliché to place the word "reality" in scare quotes. The Arbiters of Reality suggests that attending to the construction of the real in public life is more than simply a language of critique: it must also be understood as a specific kind of romantic self-invention.

Reality TV
Reality TV

Author: Misha Kavka

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2012-02-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0748654356

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This book is a study of the 'Reality TV' format which, in less than a decade, has transformed network programming schedules, branded satellite and digital stations, become a favourite target for anti-television campaigners, and turned viewers into savvy r

The Reality Game
The Reality Game

Author: Samuel Woolley

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1541768248

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Fake news posts and Twitter trolls were just the beginning. What will happen when misinformation moves from our social media feeds into our everyday lives? Online disinformation stormed our political process in 2016 and has only worsened since. Yet as Samuel Woolley shows in this urgent book, it may pale in comparison to what's to come: humanlike automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality, and more. These technologies have the power not just to manipulate our politics, but to make us doubt our eyes and ears and even feelings. Deeply researched and compellingly written, The Reality Game describes the profound impact these technologies will have on our lives. Each new invention built without regard for its consequences edges us further into this digital dystopia. Yet Woolley does not despair. Instead, he argues pointedly for a new culture of innovation, one built around accountability and especially transparency. With social media dragging us into a never-ending culture war, we must learn to stop fighting and instead prevent future manipulation. This book shows how we can use our new tools not to control people but to empower them.

The Last Individual
The Last Individual

Author: Trenton Fervor

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2007-08

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 0595452698

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There pervades today, a disturbing zealotry with which the sociopolitical culture has imagined for itself a prerogative to divest the individual of his rightful sovereignty and discretion, and to foist upon him an often-arbitrary excess of compulsions and impositions. What seems to be emerging in contemporary life is a mentality that could be described as a sociomaniacal cult. The world is presently marked by an ever-increasing bias toward extending unduly-and often illegitimately-a superfluity of external authorities over the individual. With astonishing insolence and arrogance, the illuminati establishment presumes to righteously dispossess individuals of their sovereignty, and to coerce them according to its particular vision of moral rectitude. The individual per se is being destroyed-swallowed up by an obsessive ideology of obligatory symbiotic unity. The nexus of authority has become so bastardized by the operation of the sociomaniac's delusional confidence in particular utopian collective visions that little remains of individual man. What does remain is the social automaton: the docile dependent of a paternalistic, illuminati ruling-class, which assumes exclusively for itself the functions of cognition and volition, and the privileged status as 'Homo-Sapien zookeeper.' The Last Individual reflects upon this theme of compulsory hyper-sociality through a collection of ruminations and ponderings involving the individual, his sovereignty, and his relationship to the world around him. It also considers the underlying componentry of ideological perspectives in general since the soundness of any ideological outlook depends on the foundation of assumptions supporting it. The material herein represents an ideological collage intended to induce or facilitate the meandering of the reader's mind through the complex of issues relating to the tensions between individual voluntaryism and communal coercivism.

The Return of Gandhi
The Return of Gandhi

Author: Dr. D. Vizai Bhaskar

Publisher: Notion Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 1638736243

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“The Return of Gandhi”, in my opinion, rightly predicts that the Mahatma would not sit around and mourn the loss of his legacy. Rather, he would travel this great land, see, learn and understand. And he would then spring to action. Dalits and Adivasis constitute the very heart of Indian society and their pain resonated deeply with Gandhi and he saw their upliftment simply as the pursuit of justice. In the course of my work with the United Nations, I have seen just how large an impact Gandhi left on the world. I recall a youth in a totalitarian country once asking me, “You had Gandhi…who do we have?”. In his words was a fervent longing for a leader who spoke to the masses of his country and for an example that he could identify with. I was barely surprised when his country had a non-violent revolution a year later. For whenever Gandhi is remembered, his spirit returns. Dr Vizai Bhaskar’s Gandhi vows to “lift India from the quick sand of political delinquency and the slush of corruption and dishonesty” to “the solid rock of political and economic Justice”. He promises to return, to protect the persecuted, “the good and the innocent”, and to become the “body, mind and soul of the common man”. Indians may give up Gandhi’s ways, but let us pray that Gandhi will never give up on India. - Raja Karthikeya. Diplomat, United Nations

The Other Side of Truth
The Other Side of Truth

Author: Paul Kimball

Publisher: Andrews UK Limited

Published: 2013-04-02

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0991697510

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In The Other Side of Truth, filmmaker Paul Kimball crosses the Rubicon of the imagination to explore the idea that what we call the 'paranormal' is actually a form of artistic expression created by an advanced non-human intelligence to inspire us to think about who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. Using his own journey of discovery as the starting point, Kimball presents the 'other side of truth' - the world not as we have been told it is, but as we are being encouraged to imagine that it could become.

Hide Your Children
Hide Your Children

Author: Liz Wheeler

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1684514789

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Having conquered all the major institutions of our culture, the left is closing in on its final frontier—your children. In this new book, Liz Wheeler exposes where the forces of wokeness are at work and explains how parents can fight back for a change. Everythingis on the line. Despite the occasional victory, conservatives are on the defensive on every front of the culture wars, especially America’s schools. Planned Parenthood is funding gender theory indoctrination, groomer teachers are introducing youngsters to pornography, Disney executives are bragging about their “queerness agenda,” and teacher’s unions are poisoning young minds with racism. If someone doesn’t stand up and fight, these ideas will be the norm for a new generation. A distressing number of parents refuse to see how depraved our schools have become. The next generation will determine the fate of the American experiment in ordered liberty. Will they pass it on to their children, or will we lose our nation forever? Parents and their allies must go on the offensive in this existential fight. Fortunately, they have the truth on their side. It is not too late.

Telegraphies
Telegraphies

Author: Kay Yandell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-11-09

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0190901055

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Telegraphies explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures' telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, nation, and god. The book opens by discussing such Native American telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to challenge common notions that long-distance speech practices emerged only in conjunction with capitalist industrialization. Kay Yandell analyzes the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation Telegraphies integrates visions of Morse's electromagnetic telegraph, with its claim to speak new, coded words and to send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the miles. Such writers as Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Ella Cheever Thayer crafted memoirs, poetic odes, and novels that envision how the birth of instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, build community, and conceive of the divine. While some writers celebrated far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical Manifest Destiny to overspread America's primitive cultures, others revealed how telecommunication could empower previously silenced voices to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as bodies remained confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography. Ultimately, Telegraphies broadens the way literary scholars conceive of telecommunications technologies while providing a rich understanding of similarities between literatures often considered to have little in common.

C.G. Jung
C.G. Jung

Author: C. G. Jung

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0691237905

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Carl Gustav Jung, the great Swiss psychologist, who died in 1961 in his eighty-sixth year, was a profound thinker of extraordinary creativity. In the course of his medical practice he reflected deeply on human nature and human problems, and his prolific writings bear witness to his great wisdom and insight. For this completely revised edition, selections from publications of the years 1945-1961, the last fruitful years of Jung's life, have been added, and the book has been reset in a new compact format. The selections are arranged thematically under four main headings: The Nature and Activity of the Psyche, Man in His Relation to Others, The World of Values, and On Ultimate Things. Jung's reflections frequently have a penetrating relevance to today's (and tomorrow's) problems. On prejudice: "Our unwillingness to see our own faults and the projection of them is the beginning of most quarrels, and is the strongest guarantee that injustice, animosity, and persecution are not ready to die out." On sex: "We are not yet far enough advanced to distinguish between moral and immoral behavior in the realm of free sexual activity." On religion: "No one can know what the ultimate things are. We must therefore take them as we experience them. And if such experience helps to make life healthier, more beautiful, more complete, and more satisfactory to yourself and to those you love, you may safely say: 'This was the grace of God.'"

Radical Vision
Radical Vision

Author: Soyica Diggs Colbert

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 030025833X

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A captivating portrait of Lorraine Hansberry’s life, art, and political activism--one of O Magazine's best books of April 2021 "Hits the mark as a fresh and timely portrait of an influential playwright."—Publishers Weekly In this biography of Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), the author of A Raisin in the Sun, Soyica Diggs Colbert considers the playwright’s life at the intersection of art and politics, with the theater operating as a “rehearsal room for [her] political and intellectual work.” Colbert argues that the success of Raisin overshadows Hansberry’s other contributions, including the writer’s innovative journalism and lesser known plays touching on controversial issues such as slavery, interracial communities, and black freedom movements. Colbert also details Hansberry’s unique involvement in the black freedom struggles during the Cold War and the early civil rights movement, in order to paint a full portrait of her life and impact. Drawing from Hansberry’s papers, speeches, and interviews, this book presents its subject as both a playwright and a political activist. It also reveals a new perspective on the roles of black women in mid-twentieth-century political movements.