"This is an excellent and most welcome study of the discourse about  computer communications, their narrativity as Coyne says, with  particular attention to the classic theme of unity and fragmentation."  -- Mark Poster, Professor of History and of Information and Computer  Science, University of California at Irvine    Many commentators place the computer--with its promises of  interconnectivity, subversion of hierarchy, restoration of the tribe,  revitalism of democracy, and new holism--at the pinnacle of scientific  and technological accomplishment. Yet such narratives are grounded in  the Enlightenment and romantic traditions. In this book Richard Coyne  explores the spectrum of romantic narrative that pervades the digital  age, from McLuhan's utopian vision of social reintegration by electronic  communication to claims that cyberspace creates new realities.    Technoromanticism pits itself against a hard-headed rationalism, but its  most potent antagonists are contemporary pragmatism, phenomenology,  hermeneutics, surrealism, and deconstruction--all of which infect and  subvert the romantic legacy and in turn provoke new narratives of  computing. Thus the book also serves as an introduction to the  application of contemporary theory to information technology, raising  issues of representation, space, time, interpretation, identity, and the  real. As such it provides a companion volume to Coyne's Designing  Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to  Metaphor (MIT Press, 1995).

Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real (Leonardo (Series) (Cambridge, Mass.).) PDF

The list of books you might like