The Philosopher of Palo Alto
The Philosopher of Palo Alto

Author: John Tinnell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2023-05-25

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 022675734X

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A compelling biography of Mark Weiser, a pioneering innovator whose legacy looms over the tech industry’s quest to connect everything—and who hoped for something better. When developers and critics trace the roots of today’s Internet of Things—our smart gadgets and smart cities—they may single out the same creative source: Mark Weiser (1952–99), the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so-called “father of ubiquitous computing.” But Weiser, who died young at age 46 in 1999, would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today. As John Tinnell shows in this thought-provoking narrative, Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley. A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy, he relished debates about the machine’s ultimate purpose. Good technology, Weiser argued, should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention; rather, it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world. Informed by deep archival research and interviews with Weiser’s family and colleagues, The Philosopher of Palo Alto chronicles Weiser’s struggle to initiate a new era of computing. Working in the shadows of the dot-com boom, Weiser and his collaborators made Xerox PARC headquarters the site of a grand experiment. Throughout the building, they embedded software into all sorts of objects—coffeepots, pens, energy systems, ID badges—imbuing them with interactive features. Their push to integrate the digital and the physical soon caught on. Microsoft’s Bill Gates flagged Weiser’s Scientific American article “The Computer for the 21st Century” as a must-read. Yet, as more tech leaders warmed to his vision, Weiser grew alarmed about where they wished to take it. In this fascinating story of an innovator and a big idea, Tinnell crafts a poignant and critical history of today’s Internet of Things. At the heart of the narrative is Weiser’s desire for deeper connection, which animated his life and inspired his notion of what technology at its best could be.

Actionable Media
Actionable Media

Author: John Tinnell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0190678070

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In 1991, Mark Weiser and his team at Xerox PARC declared they were reinventing computers for the twenty-first century. The computer would become integrated into the fabric of everyday life; it would shift to the background rather than being itself an object of focus. The resulting rise of ubiquitous computing (smartphones, smartglasses, smart cities) have since thoroughly colonized our digital landscape. In Actionable Media, John Tinnell contends that there is an unsung rhetorical dimension to Weiser's legacy, which stretches far beyond recent iProducts. Taking up Weiser's motto, "Start from the arts and humanities," Tinnell develops a theoretical framework for understanding nascent initiatives--the Internet of things, wearable interfaces, augmented reality--in terms of their intellectual history, their relationship to earlier communication technologies, and their potential to become vibrant platforms for public culture and critical media production. It is clear that an ever-widening array of everyday spaces now double as venues for multimedia authorship. Writers, activists, and students, in cities and towns everywhere, are digitally augmenting physical environments. Audio walks embed narratives around local parks for pedestrians to encounter during a stroll; online forums are woven into urban infrastructure and suburban plazas to invigorate community politics. This new wave of digital communication, which Tinnell terms "actionable media," is presented through case studies of exemplar projects by leading artists, designers, and research-creation teams. Chapters alter notions of ubiquitous computing through concepts drawn from Bernard Stiegler, Gregory Ulmer, and Hannah Arendt; from comparative media analyses with writing systems such as cuneiform, urban signage, and GUI software; and from relevant stylistic insights gleaned from the open air arts practices of Augusto Boal, Claude Monet, and Janet Cardiff. Actionable Media challenges familiar claims about the combination of physical and digital spaces, beckoning contemporary media studies toward an alternative substrate of historical precursors, emerging forms, design philosophies, and rhetorical principles.

Reading Writing Interfaces
Reading Writing Interfaces

Author: Lori Emerson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1452942196

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Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries. Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature’s defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson’s self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book. Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.

Mobile Interface Theory
Mobile Interface Theory

Author: Jason Farman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1136942866

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In this updated second edition, Jason Farman offers a ground-breaking look at how location-aware mobile technologies are radically shifting our sense of identity, community, and place-making practices. Mobile Interface Theory is a foundational book in mobile media studies, with the first edition winning the Book of the Year Award from the Association of Internet Researchers. It explores a range of mobile media practices from interface design to maps, AR/VR, mobile games, performances that use mobile devices and mobile storytelling projects. Throughout, Farman provides readers with a rich theoretical framework to understand the ever-transforming landscape of mobile media and how they shape our bodily practices in the spaces we move through. This fully updated second edition features updated examples throughout reflecting the shifts in mobile technology. This is the ideal text for those studying mobile media, social media, digital media, and mobile storytelling.

The Subject's Point of View
The Subject's Point of View

Author: Katalin Farkas

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-08-19

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 019161551X

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Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism - which is not adopted - but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception.

Situating Semantics
Situating Semantics

Author: Michael O'Rourke

Publisher: Bradford Books

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 618

ISBN-13:

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Original commentary on the work of philosopher John Perry by prominent contemporary analytic philosophers, with Perry's detailed and original responses; topics include the metaphysics of identity, semantics, and philosophy of mind. John Perry, Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University, is one of a handful of contemporary analytic philosophers to combine the focused approach of most current work in analytic philosophy with the more expansive systems-building of earlier analytic philosophers and contemporary philosophers in other disciplines. Perry, like W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davison, David Lewis, and Hilary Putnam, focuses on narrow topics across a broad range of subjects. In this volume, leading contemporary analytic philosophers contribute original essays in each of the areas that have been most influenced by Perry's work--metaphysics, language, and mind. Perry himself contributes detailed and original replies. After a comprehensive introduction to Perry's work by the editors that places semantics at the heart of Perry's philosophical strategy, the essays discuss Perry's contributions to the metaphysics of identity, the philosophy of language--in particular, contributions related to reference and unarticulated constituents--and the philosophy of mind. The essays and replies provide new perspectives on Perry's philosophical contributions over the last four decades, and yield insights into contemporary debates on these topics. Contributors Robert Audi, Kent Bach, Patricia Blanchette, Herman Cappelen, Eros Corazza, Ernie Lepore, Brian Loar, Peter Ludlow, Genoveva Marti, Michael McKinsey, Stephen Neale, Michael O'Rourke, John Perry, François Recanati, Cara Spencer, Kenneth A. Taylor, Corey Washington

The Digital Factory
The Digital Factory

Author: Moritz Altenried

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-01-05

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 022681548X

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"In recent years, tech companies such as Google and Facebook have rocked the world as they have seemingly revolutionized the culture of work. We've all heard stories of lounges outfitted with ping pong tables, kitchens with kombucha on tap, and other amenities that supposedly foster creative thinking. Nothing could seem further from earlier workplaces associated with a different revolution in capitalism: factories, in which employees are required to perform highly circumscribed tasks as quickly as possible to meet quotas--for next to no pay. However, as Moritz Altenried shows in The Digital Factory, these types of workplaces are not so far from the Googleplex as we might think. While recent accounts of the transformation of labor after the demise of the factory highlight the creative, communicative, immaterial, or artistic features of contemporary labor, Altenried uncovers the factory-like conditions in which many new digital workers perform their jobs. These workers, such as video game testers, social media content moderators, and Amazon fulfillment center workers, perform highly repetitive, unskilled tasks for low and often contingent wages. Based on more than five years of research in different sites using ethnography and interviews combined with an analysis of infrastructural technologies, Altenried's book gives us a first-hand account of many new forms of digital labor that drive contemporary capitalism. He shows that though today's factories might look and feel different than they did 150 years ago, they still follow the same logics and produce the same unequal outcomes"--

William James
William James

Author: Robert D. Richardson

Publisher: HMH

Published: 2007-09-14

Total Pages: 638

ISBN-13: 0547526733

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The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion—on modernism itself. Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature. A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American families, James struggled to achieve greatness amid the brilliance of his theologian father; his brother, the novelist Henry James; and his sister, Alice James. After studying medicine, he ultimately realized that his true interests lay in philosophy and psychology, a choice that guided his storied career at Harvard, where he taught some of America’s greatest minds. But it is James’s contributions to intellectual study that reveal the true complexity of man. In this biography that seeks to understand James’s life through his work—including Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism—Robert D. Richardson has crafted an exceptionally insightful work that explores the mind of a genius, resulting in “a gripping and often inspiring story of intellectual and spiritual adventure” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “A magnificent biography.” —The Washington Post

Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality

Author: Sean Morey

Publisher: Parlor Press LLC

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1602355584

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Augmented Reality: Innovative Perspectives Across Art, Industry, and Academia includes a mix of critical/theoretical essays from humanities scholars, augmented reality (AR) artwork (with accompanying reflections) by leading digital artists, and interviews with AR software developers and other industry insiders. Augmented Reality is used in the design of the printed book, effectively linking appropriate pages to relevant digital materials on the Web or physical spaces. Contributors bring critical reflection and artistic ingenuity into conversation with current design thinking and project development across the AR industry.

The Schopenhauer Cure
The Schopenhauer Cure

Author: Irvin Yalom

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0061840882

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From the internationally bestselling author of Love's Executioner and When Nietzsche Wept, comes a novel of group therapy with a cast of memorably wounded characters struggling to heal pain and change lives Suddenly confronted with his own mortality after a routine checkup, eminent psychotherapist Julius Hertzfeld is forced to reexamine his life and work -- and seeks out Philip Slate, a sex addict whom he failed to help some twenty years earlier. Yet Philip claims to be cured -- miraculously transformed by the pessimistic teachings of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer -- and is, himself, a philosophical counselor in training. Philip's dour, misanthropic stance compels Julius to invite Philip to join his intensive therapy group in exchange for tutoring on Schopenhauer. But with mere months left, life may be far too short to help Philip or to compete with him for the hearts and minds of the group members. And then again, it might be just long enough.