[PDF] Snow Crash eBook

Author : Neal Stephenson
Publisher : Spectra
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 21,77 MB
Release : 2003-08-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0553898191

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Now featuring never-before-seen material, the “brilliantly realized” (The New York Times Book Review) breakthrough novel from visionary author Neal Stephenson, a modern classic that predicted the metaverse and inspired generations of Silicon Valley innovators Hiro lives in a Los Angeles where franchises line the freeway as far as the eye can see. The only relief from the sea of logos is within the autonomous city-states, where law-abiding citizens don’t dare leave their mansions. Hiro delivers pizza to the mansions for a living, defending his pies from marauders when necessary with a matched set of samurai swords. His home is a shared 20 X 30 U-Stor-It. He spends most of his time goggled in to the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary. But in the club known as The Black Sun, his fellow hackers are being felled by a weird new drug called Snow Crash that reduces them to nothing more than a jittering cloud of bad digital karma (and IRL, a vegetative state). Investigating the Infocalypse leads Hiro all the way back to the beginning of language itself, with roots in an ancient Sumerian priesthood. He’ll be joined by Y.T., a fearless teenaged skateboard courier. Together, they must race to stop a shadowy virtual villain hell-bent on world domination.

Author : Lisa Yaszek
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 16,80 MB
Release : 2013-12-16
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 1136716165

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First Published in 2002. Advanced technologies challenge conventional understandings of the human subject by transforming the body into a conduit between external forces and the internal psyche. This title discusses the intense controversy about how to best understand and represent human subjectivity in a technology-intensive era. Yaszek provides an overview by linking specific modes of identity and agency to engagement with specific manifestations of technology itself.

Author : Walter Benn Michaels
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 48,20 MB
Release : 2013-10-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1400849594

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The Shape of the Signifier is a critique of recent theory--primarily literary but also cultural and political. Bringing together previously unconnected strands of Michaels's thought--from "Against Theory" to Our America--it anatomizes what's fundamentally at stake when we think of literature in terms of the experience of the reader rather than the intention of the author, and when we substitute the question of who people are for the question of what they believe. With signature virtuosity, Michaels shows how the replacement of ideological difference (we believe different things) with identitarian difference (we speak different languages, we have different bodies and different histories) organizes the thinking of writers from Richard Rorty to Octavia Butler to Samuel Huntington to Kathy Acker. He then examines how this shift produces the narrative logic of texts ranging from Toni Morrison's Beloved to Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire. As with everything Michaels writes, The Shape of the Signifier is sure to leave controversy and debate in its wake.

Author : Joseph Tabbi
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 40,57 MB
Release : 2018-05-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501717650

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The convergence of twentieth-century narrative and technology is one of the most important developments in current literary study. A decade after the founding of the Society for Literature and Science and the appearance of such influential books as Kathleen Woodward's Culture of Information and William Paulson's The Noise of Culture, Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz have edited a landmark volume to summarize this still-emerging field. Twelve original essays and the editors' introductory overview show how these theoretical concerns can contribute to the practical study of narrative. Reading Matters covers the range of contemporary literature, from the canonical novels of high modernism and postmodernism through subjects new to the academic agenda, such as cyberpunk and hypertext fiction. In an age that has proclaimed the death of the novel many times over, the contributors argue persuasively for the continued vitality of literary narrative. By responding in ingenious ways to the capabilities of other media, they assert, the novel has enlarged and redefined its territory of representation and its range of techniques and play, while maintaining its viability in the new media assemblage.

Author : Simone Fischer-Hübner
Publisher : Springer
Page : 461 pages
File Size : 36,93 MB
Release : 2010-08-25
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0387790268

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The increasing diversity of Infonnation Communication Technologies and their equally diverse range of uses in personal, professional and official capacities raise challenging questions of identity in a variety of contexts. Each communication exchange contains an identifier which may, or may not, be intended by the parties involved. What constitutes an identity, how do new technologies affect identity, how do we manage identities in a globally networked infonnation society? th th From the 6 to the 10 August 2007, IFIP (International Federation for Infonnation Processing) working groups 9. 2 (Social Accountability), 9. 6/11. 7 (IT rd Misuse and the Law) and 11. 6 (Identity Management) hold their 3 Intemational Summer School on "The Future of Identity in the Infonnation Society" in cooperation with the EU Network of Excellence FIDIS at Karlstad University. The Summer School addressed the theme of Identity Management in relation to current and future technologies in a variety of contexts. The aim of the IFIP summer schools has been to introduce participants to the social implications of Infonnation Technology through the process of infonned discussion. Following the holistic approach advocated by the involved IFIP working groups, a diverse group of participants ranging from young doctoral students to leading researchers in the field were encouraged to engage in discussion, dialogue and debate in an infonnal and supportive setting. The interdisciplinary, and intemational, emphasis of the Summer School allowed for a broader understanding of the issues in the technical and social spheres.

Author : Daniel Dinello
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 45,16 MB
Release : 2005
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0292709862

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Dinello examines the conflict between the techno-utopia promised by real world scientists and the techno-dystopia predicted by science fiction. The book summarises the current state of each technology, while presenting corresponding reactions in science fiction.

Author : Kristina Baudemann
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 191 pages
File Size : 14,67 MB
Release : 2021-12-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1000529894

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This book examines the future in Indigenous North American speculative literature and digital arts. Asking how different Indigenous works imagine the future and how they negotiate settler colonial visions of what is to come, the chapters illustrate that the future is not an immutable entity but a malleable textual/digital product that can function as both a colonial tool and a catalyst for decolonization. Central to this study is the development of a methodology that helps unearth the signifying structures producing the future in selected works by Darcie Little Badger, Gerald Vizenor, Stephen Graham Jones, Skawennati, Danis Goulet, Scott Benesiinaabandan, Postcommodity, Kite, Jeff Barnaby, and Ryan Singer. Drawing on Jason Lewis’s "future imaginary" as the theoretical core, the book describes the various forms of textual representation and virtual simulation through which notions of Indigenous continuation are expressed in literary and new media works. Arguing that Indigenous authors and artists apply the aesthetics of the future as a strategy in their works, the volume conceptualizes its multimedia corpus as a continuously growing archive of, and for, Indigenous futures.

Author : William S. Haney
Publisher : Rodopi
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 35,79 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Art
ISBN : 9042019484

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Addressing a key issue related to human nature, this book argues that the first-person experience of pure consciousness may soon be under threat from posthuman biotechnology. In exploiting the mind's capacity for instrumental behavior, posthumanists seek to extend human experience by physically projecting the mind outward through the continuity of thought and the material world, as through telepresence and other forms of prosthetic enhancements. Posthumanism envisions a biology/machine symbiosis that will promote this extension, arguably at the expense of the natural tendency of the mind to move toward pure consciousness. As each chapter of this book contends, by forcibly overextending and thus jeopardizing the neurophysiology of consciousness, the posthuman condition could in the long term undermine human nature, defined as the effortless capacity for transcending the mind's conceptual content.Presented here for the first time, the essential argument of this book is more than a warning; it gives a direction: far better to practice patience and develop pure consciousness and evolve into a higher human being than to fall prey to the Faustian temptations of biotechnological power. As argued throughout the book, each person must choose for him or herself between the technological extension of physical experience through mind, body and world on the one hand, and the natural powers of human consciousness on the other as a means to realize their ultimate vision.

Author : Leighton Evans
Publisher : Emerald Group Publishing
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 28,95 MB
Release : 2022-10-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1804550213

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From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds analyzes the political economy of emerging tech with the mechanisms of identity and behavioral constraints involved to map what a metaverse might be like, whether it can happen, and just why some companies seem so determined to make it happen.

Author : Isiah Lavender III
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 20,80 MB
Release : 2014-09-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1626743061

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Black and Brown Planets embarks on a timely exploration of the American obsession with color in its look at the sometimes contrary intersections of politics and race in science fiction. The contributors, including De Witt D. Kilgore, Edward James, Lisa Yaszek, and Marleen S. Barr, among others, explore science fiction worlds of possibility (literature, television, and film), lifting blacks, Latin Americans, and indigenous peoples out from the background of this historically white genre. This collection considers the role of race and ethnicity in our visions of the future. The first section emphasizes the political elements of black identity portrayed in science fiction from black America to the vast reaches of interstellar space framed by racial history. In the next section, analysis of indigenous science fiction addresses the effects of colonization, helps discard the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovers ancestral traditions in order to adapt in a post-Native-apocalyptic world. Likewise, this section explores the affinity between science fiction and subjectivity in Latin American cultures from the role of science and industrialization to the effects of being in and moving between two cultures. By infusing more color in this otherwise monochrome genre, Black and Brown Planets imagines alternate racial galaxies with viable political futures in which people of color determine human destiny.