Back to current year SOS webpages

This page was lifted from the table of contents of the following book:
RESISTING THE VIRTUAL LIFE- The Culture and Politics of Information
Edited by James Brook and Iain A. Boal City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872862992 .

Topics:

THE NEW INFORMATION ENCLOSURES

REWIRING THE BODY

DEGRADING WORK

THE REPAINTING OF MODERN LIFE

THE NEW INFORMATION ENCLOSURES

A Flow of Monsters: Luddism and Virtual Technologies
Iain A. Boal
Proposes a historic context for the new machinery of domination, assaying the possibilities and limits of resistance against further virtuality and paranoia.

The Global Information Highway: Project for an Ungovernable World
Herbert I. Schiller
Scrutinizes Washington’s proposal to make the information superhighway a world project-- an initiative that extends a half-century-old U.S. effort to achieve global information mastery.

It's Discrimination, Stupid!
Oscar H. Gandy Jr.
Examines how personal information is gathered and how it is used to extend control over the distribution of options available to citizens, employees, and consumers.

Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier
Laura Miller
Argues that the "electronic frontier" metaphor tends to impose on women "on line" the same all-too-familiar, invidious, traditional feminine identities.

From Internet to Information Superhighway
Howard Besser
Assesses the likely future of on-line information flows: passive consumption, bland cultural productions, pay-per access, and reduction of public space and unprogrammed experience.

Media Activism and Radical Democracy
Jesse Drew
A pioneer of"guerrilla television" places his experience in the history of communications media used as a democratizing tool.

Making Technology Democratic
Richard E. Sclove
Shows how technological systems in effect legislate social life and sets out principles for a politics of technology that deepens rather than diminishes participatory democracy.

REWIRING THE BODY

Soldier, Cyborg, Citizen
Kevin Robins and Les Levidow
Examine the psychotic splitting -- induced by military and civilian cyborg technologies -- that leads to the paranoia and phantasies of omnipotence like those displayed during the Gulf War.

Body, Brain, and Communication
George Lakoff interviewed by Iain A. Boal
Deconstructs the "conduit metaphor" of human communication and understanding, whereby the rich, embodied experience of language is travestied by its reduction to circuits of information.

Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life
Ellen Ullman
Gives a practitioner's account of the masculinist world of software engineers who, in living "close to the machine," are asynchronous with the rest of humanity.

Sade and Cyberspace
John Simmons
Contrasts the emotionally empty realm of Cartesian rationalism with the Sadean space of the real, contemplative body.
 
 
DEGRADING WORK

Info Fetishism
Doug Henwood
Debunks the myth that in the "information economy" symbol-mongers will rule and reemphasizes the materiality of information and its role in the circulation of commodities.

Digital Palsy: RSI and Restructuring Capital
R. Dennis Hayes
Lifts the shroud of ignorance and denial around the intensified use of the new "knowledge machines" to reveal an exponential rise in computer-related injuries.

Computers, Thinking, and Schools in "the New World Economic Order"
Monty Neill
Exposes the fallacies underlying the computerization of schools and offers an analysis of the role of education of workers in a world dominated by transnational corporations.

The Aesthetic of the Computer
Daniel Harris
Looks into the screen past the machine's utility and, in the decor of screen-savers, detects the enthralling boredom of the office.

THE REPAINTING OF MODERN LIFE

Banalities of Information
Marina McDougall
Brings cyberspace down to earth in a photo essay that looks at the integration of communications technology into everyday life.

The Garden of Merging Paths
Rebecca Solnit
Beginning with the Winchester rifle and the maze of the Winchester Mystery House, maps the metaphors and ecologies of the transformation of Silicon Valley from orchards to high-tech industrial park.

The Shape of Truth to Come: New Media and Knowledge
Chris Carlsson
Speculates on the odds of a rich, less mediated life breaking through the web of virtual interactivity woven by "the integrated spectacle:'

Drowning by MicroGallery
Chris Riding
Wanders, without particular nostalgia for canvas and pigment, through the reproduction of the British National Gallery on CD-ROM.

In the Tracks of Jurassic Park
Phil Tippett interviewed by Iain A. Boal
Discusses the impact of new digital technologies on the craft of animation and special effects in the motion-picture industry.

Reading and Riding with Borges
James Brook
With Borges as guide, threads his way through the hell of information and the labyrinth of hypertext to... the book.