Culture and Technology
Friday, November 6th, 2009
at
8:45 pm
We are ‘going virtual’ in more and more areas of our lives – from shopping to education, filing systems to love affairs. How can we assess the relationship between technology and culture when culture is so imbued with technology? This clear, concise and readable text aims to offer the student a one-stop guide through this complex and slippery terrain. Introducing a wealth of theoretical perspectives in a lucid and engaging style and covering a range of topical, challenging and intriguing examples – from cyborgs to digital art – it will be an essential text for everyone wanting to make sense of crucial forces of change on contemporary culture.
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Tagged with: Culture • Technology
From what I’ve seen, this book contains one of the best overviews of people and ideas that have influenced this field for the past few centuries. It’s dated 2003 so includes some very recent material as well.
This is not one of those “intro to” books that water down the subject and leave you falling asleep at your chair. It’s a dynamic introduction to exciting debates over technology, at the same time that it presents the case to think about technology along with culture rather than in opposition to it. Some great readings of art too, and the relation of art/artists to the question of technology. It also lays the groundwork for the recent theorizations of technology in books like Transductions: Bodies And Machines at Speed (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory). I highly recommend Culture and Technology – both for readers looking for an introduction to debates on technology, and to those interested in some good thinking on the question of the intersection of culture and technology.