Information Please advances the ongoing critical project of the media scholar Mark Poster: theorizing the social and cultural effects of electronically mediated information. In this book Poster conceptualizes a new relation of humans to information machines, a relation that avoids privileging either the human or the machine but instead focuses on the structures of their interactions. Synthesizing a broad range of critical theory, he explores how texts, images, and sounds are made ...

In this path-breaking work, Mark Poster highlights the nature of the newly emerging forms of social life, in the current era. The flexibility of language which the computer allows makes the written word less certain and less concrete. The result of these changes, Poster argues, is a new communication experience, an interaction between humankind and a new kind of reality.Poster discusses the addictive properties of television and arcade video games, as well as the surveillance possi...

This book examines the implications of new communication technologies in the light of the most recent work in social and cultural theory and argues that new developments in electronic media, such as the Internet and Virtual Reality, justify the designation of a "second media age".

First Published in 2001. In this collection of essays and interviews, Mark Poster examines theoretical approaches and develops his own position on our information based society. He contends that new communications media disrupt and transfigure the way identities are constituted in cultural exchanges. He looks in detail at several aspects of what might be called "internet culture", including virtuality and democracy. Poster advocates an awareness of the Internet and other new forms of commu...

Is the Internet the key to a reinvigorated public life? Or will it fragment society by enabling citizens to associate only with like-minded others? Online community has provided social researchers with insights into our evolving social life. As suburbanization and the breakdown of the extended family and neighborhood isolate individuals more and more, the Internet appears as a possible source for reconnection. Are virtual communities 'real' enough to support the kind of personal commitment...

Across Vietnam, a variety of modern propaganda posters can be seen. These generally commemorate historical and political events, or relate to Vietnamese culture or modern Vietnamese society. Please note that this book does not contain propaganda posters created during wars with France and the United States, although those events are referenced on some of the posters in this collection.Each poster is accompanied by an approximate translation and historical/cultural references where ...

Across Vietnam, a variety of modern propaganda posters can be seen. These generally commemorate historical and political events, or relate to Vietnamese culture or modern Vietnamese society. Please note that this book does not contain propaganda posters created during wars with France and the United States, although those events are referenced on some of the posters in this collection.This is the second collection that I have put together, following on from '101 Modern Vietnamese P...

Archipelago is one of the most important and influential literary magazines of the lasttwenty years. Running to twelve editions, it was edited by Andrew McNeillie, with theassistance later of James McDonald Lockhart, and began as an attempt to reimagine therelationships between the islands of Ireland and Britain. Archipelago has brought togetherestablished and emerging artists in creative conversations that have transformed the studyof islands, coasts and...

In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, Vilém Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing—and much that cannot be—can be recorded and transmitted by other means.Confirming Flusser’s status as a theori...