By Ted Friedman
** top of the range test **
Electric Dreams turns to the earlier to track the cultural heritage of pcs. Ted Friedman charts the struggles to outline the meanings of those robust machines over greater than a century, from the failure of Charles Babbage’s “difference engine” within the 19th century to modern struggles over dossier swapping, open resource software program, and the way forward for on-line journalism. to bare the hopes and fears encouraged through desktops, Electric Dreams examines quite a lot of texts, together with motion pictures, ads, novels, magazines, machine video games, blogs, or even working systems.
Electric Dreams argues that the debates over desktops are seriously very important simply because they're how americans speak about the longer term. In a society that during such a lot of methods has given up on imagining something higher than multinational capitalism, cyberculture deals room to dream of alternative forms of tomorrow.
Read or Download Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture PDF
Best communications books
The Communications Facility Design Handbook (Electronics Handbook Series)
The tasks of the procedure engineer are many and sundry, specially as they relate to facility layout and development. winning execution of those obligations calls for an realizing of the underlying applied sciences, the appropriate caliber criteria, and the right kind equipment for attaining them.
Perfect Phrases for Customer Service, Second Edition
The precise word for each scenario . . . each time you've gotten heard it 1000000 occasions: ''The shopper is usually correct. '' yet let’s face it--sometimes the buyer is misinformed, stressed, or downright tough. the facility to deal with such shoppers is what separates the intense specialist from the typical worker.
Digital Satellite Communications Systems and Technologies: Military and Civil Applications
One of the house actions of the final 3 many years satellite tv for pc communications (SATCOM) has discovered the widest software in assembly either civil and armed forces communications necessities. numerous overseas, local and nationwide SATCOM structures of accelerating ability, power and complexity were and are being carried out through the years.
Reputation strategy and analytics in a hyper-connected world
Popularity administration concepts that paintings amidst the unceasing movement of data recognition process and Analytics in a Hyper-Connected international is an entire consultant to company communications and acceptance administration. masking a number situations from excellent to catastrophic, this ebook offers a transparent blueprint for instruction, execution, and past.
- Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior and Digital Communication: Language Structures and Social Interaction
- Boring Meetings Suck: Get More Out of Your Meetings, or Get Out of More Meetings
- Can do writing : the proven ten-step system for fast and effective business writing
- Crisp: Thinking On Your Feet: Tools to Communicate Clearly and Convincingly (Crisp Fifty-Minute Books)
- Transitions from digital communications to quantum communications: concepts and prospects
Additional resources for Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture
Example text
As much as contemporary theory has quite properly emphasized that we employ our own political agendas to organize the past, most readers . . tend to naturalize past events, assuming that since events did happen they somehow had to happen, that social change and, given the emphasis of this novel, technological change are determined. One major effect of alternate history is to dramatize that what we accept as inevitable is only contingent, only one among an infinite number of possibilities, of forking paths.
These abstract features of logical organization are almost impossible to discuss without using concepts which have been developed in modern computing. Such concepts as the stored program, programming, or array processing carry many implications to a modern computer per son which may or may not in some measure have been clear to Bab bage. 4 Babbage worked on his Analytical Engine from 1834 to his death in 1871, but never completed the machine. He died a bitter, unappreciated man. Babbage is a problematic figure in the historical memory of computing culture.
Bart Kosko, author of Fuzzy writes, Thinking, in much of our science, math, logic and culture we have assumed a world of blacks and whites that does not change. Every statement is true or false. Every law, statute, and club rule applies to you or not. The dig ital computer, with its high-speed binary strings of Is and Os, stands as the emblem of the black and white and its triumph over the scientific mind. . This faith in black and the white, this bivalence, reaches back in the West to at least the ancient Greeks.