sábado, 10 de maio de 2008

Very interesting books


Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Writing Science) (Paperback)
by Friedrich Kittler


"Synopsis
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation all data had to pass through the needle s eye of the written signifier but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers. Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan.

Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines. "


# Paperback: 315 pages
# Publisher: Stanford University Press (1999)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 0804732337
# ISBN-13: 978-0804732338

Source:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gramophone-Film-Typewriter-Writing-Science/
dp/0804732337/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210419615&sr=1-2












The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Paperback)
by Jonathan Sterne

"Synopsis
The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through an historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave-robbers, doctors and patients, Deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers.

The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology."

# Paperback: 450 pages
# Publisher: Duke University Press (2003)
# Language English
# ISBN-10: 082233013X
# ISBN-13: 978-0822330134

Source:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Audible-Past-Cultural-Origins-Reproduction/
dp/082233013X/ref=pd_sim_b?ie=UTF8&qid=1210419615&sr=1-8



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