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June 30, 2009
2045: A story of Our Future. By Peter Seidel. Prometheus Books.
From the book cover... Global warming, environmental degradation, the rapid pace of technological innovation, and the economic stresses of globalization give rise to much speculation about the future. How will these dynamic factors affect society in the coming decades? In this dystopian novel, environmental expert Peter Seidel has created a stark and haunting vision of a world on the near horizon. #
Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes. By Elizabeth Losh. MIT Press.
From the book cover... Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government -- even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government's digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government's digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users. #
Simulation and its Discontents. By Sherry Turkle. MIT Press.
From the book cover... Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility. We hear it in Turkle's description of architecture students who no longer design with a pencil, of science and engineering students who admit that computer models seem more "real" than experiments in physical laboratories. #
May 30, 2009
Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World. By Jeb Brugmann, Penguin.
From the book cover... In Welcome to the Urban Revolution, Jeb Brugmann draws on two decades of fieldwork to offer an eye-opening anatomy of our urbanizing planet. Taking readers on a street-level tour of the world’s cities, Brugmann challenges conventional thinking about globalization and reveals cities as the medium for revolutionary change. From Tehran to Gdansk, urban uprisings have transformed global politics; from Guangzhou to Toronto, health crises such as the SARS epidemic are urban phenomena; from Bangalore to Chicago, cities are the incubators of new industries and environmental solutions. Welcome to the Urban Revolution argues that the twenty-first century’s greatest challenges can -- and must -- be met through new approaches to city building. #
A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century. By Jacques Attali. Arcade Publishing.
From the book cover... Attali argues that history flows in a single, stubborn direction that no upheaval, however momentous, can permanently deflect. Analyzing the past in order to predict the future, he pinpoints three political orders in human history: the ritual order, in which religious powers dominate; the imperial order, in which the military powers hold sway; and the mercantile order, in which the paramount group is the one that controls the economy. Within the last named, the author makes a case that there have been nine distinct "cores," starting around 1200, each with its world center of power and prestige, and predicts what the tenth will be by the dawn of the next century. Never, he states, has the world offered more promise for the future yet been more fraught with potential dangers. #
May 29, 2009
Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own. By James Harkin. Alfred A. Knopf.
From the book cover... Once upon a time there were no text messaging, no e-mail and no social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and MySpace. The introduction of these new forums for communication has radically transformed the way that we live -- and we can only guess what will come next. Innovative and extremely timely, Lost in Cyburbia describes the architecture of our digital life, how it has developed over the past seventy years and how it will evolve in the future. The narrative recounts how the theories of Norbert Weiner (the inventor of cybernetics) and Marshall McLuhan inspired the counterculture radicals in the sixties and seventies, and traces how their pioneering idealistic and theoretical work laid the groundwork for a system whose central idea is bringing about direct communication between peers, outside the reach of authority. #
The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What It Means for You. By Michael S. Malone. Crown Business.
From the book cover... Business considerations such as the wireless World Wide Web, billions of new consumers, and an entrepreneurial ethos are all converging. How a corporation is organized and how people will be managed and employed will change more quickly than anyone realizes. With technology poised to connect a billion new consumers from the most remote parts of the globe, corporations will enter a volatile economic era marked by unprecedented threats and opportunities. Survival will require companies to be “protean” -- nimble shape-shifters able to change direction and identity in response to a rapidly evolving international marketplace. They must, in other words, act like perpetual entrepreneurial start-ups. #
May 28, 2009
Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives. By Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds. MIT Press.
From the book cover... Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors -- media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others -- investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena. #
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