books
Click >
2007 > André Caron and Letizia
Caronia. Moving Cultures: Mobile Communication in Everyday Life. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s U Press, 2007. > This book focuses on cell phone
or mobile phone culture in Europe and North America.
It analyzes the practices of teenagers, and the verbal performances that
youth enact in response to their mobile technology. In a section
called “Life Stories of Technologies in Everyday Life,” the writers reveal
personal narratives dealing with technology:
2005 > Leander Kahney. The Cult of iPOD.
San Francisco:
No Starch Press, 2005. > Kahney pinpoints the moment in time
that ipodomania became utterly
apparent. He describes it in terms of cultural phenomenon and commodity
fetish. His non-academic writing is appealing and accessible.
2005
> Sterling,
Bruce. Shaping
Things. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2005. > Sterling
focuses on designing the future with
concerns for the past in the pursuit of “futurity”. He writes about RFID tags
in their current and future embodiments and the kinds of social consequences
we might face as a result.
2004 > Vivian Sobchack. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment
and Moving Image Culture. Los Angeles:
U of California
Press, 2004. > Sobchack’s collection of essys privileges the “lived body. . . [the
essays’] concern is not merely with the body as an abstracted
object belonging always to someone else but also with what it means to be
“embodied” and to live our animated and metamorphic existences as the
concrete, extroverted, and spirited we all objectively are” (1). She
stipulates later that “we are both objective subjects and subjective
objects” (9)
2002 > Howard Rheingold. Smart Mobs: The Next Social
Revolution. Cambridge:
Basic Books, 2002. > Rheingold writes, “smart mobs are not always
beneficial. Lynch mobs and mobocracies continue to engender atrocities. The
same convergence of technologies that opens new vistas of cooperation also
makes possible a universal surveillance economy and empowers the bloodthirsty
as well as the altruistic” (xviii).
2001 > Steve Mann (with Hal Niedzviecki). Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the
Age of the Wearable Computer. Doubleday Canada, 2001. > Artist and
inventor, Mann offers his treatise for the interactions between humans and
computers. He redefines wearable
computers to constitute a future for them that is both liberating and
countercultural, rather than only hegemonically goading.
2001 > Woodrow Barfield and Thomas Caudell. Fundamentals of Wearable
Computers and Augmented Reality. Mahwah,
New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001. >
this collection includes articles about wearable technologies by several
famous inventors including by many well known wearable inventors including
Steve Mann, Thad Starner, David Mizell, Alex Pentland and Mark Billinghurst,
to name a few.
1999 > N. Katherine Hayles. How We Became Posthuman:
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics > One of
the first books to chart the symbolic transformation of the notion of human to the notion of the posthuman
across a inventor’s discourses, science fiction, cultural history and other
texts.
1999 > Reinhold Behringer, Gudrun Klinker, and David
W. Mizell. (Eds.) Augmented Reality: Placing
Artificial Objects in Real Scenes. Natick: A.K. Peters, 1999. > This
collection is comprised of inventors’ papers drawn from the First
International Workshop on Augmented Reality, the Proceedings of IWAR 1998. This book seeks to work toward a common
vision for augmented reality: “The AR community does seem to be working in
the direction of AR schemes that are wearable, are ubiquitous, involve all
the human senses, and link information with our environment. Associating AR
with a certain technology is considered a limiting notion” (xvi).
1999 > Yuichi Ohta and Hideyuki Tamura. Mixed Reality: Merging
Real and Virtual Worlds. Tokyo : Ohmsha, 1999. > A published version
of the proceedings of the First International Symposium on Mixed Reality
(ISMR ’99).
1998 > Neil Gershenfeld. When Things Start to
Think. New York:
Henry Holt, 1999. > Gershenefld explores immersive and somewhat radical
technologies that are just over the hozion in terms of emergence.
1998 > Michael Heim. Virtual Realism.
New York : Oxford U Press, 1998.
1993 > Michael Heim. The Metaphysics of Virtual
Reality. New York : Oxford U Press, 1993.
> One of the first a humanist explorations of virtual reality. Rather than
concentrating on technology, this book brings questions of philosophy to the
experience of virtual reality.
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