In his 1995 book, Being Digital (Vintage), Nicholas Negroponte drew a sharp and important distinction between bits and atoms, bits being the smallest workable unit of the digital world, and atoms being their closest analog (no pun intended) in the physical world. In the meantime, this distinction has become more and more important as our… Continue reading Too Much Information: Four Recent Books
“…which may have also very well been the reason for Martin Heidegger’s mistake, now that one stops to think about it. Which is to say that very possibly Martin Heidegger was busily writing one of his books through all of that time. Very possibly the book he was so busily writing was one of the… Continue reading Headroom for Heidegger: Three New Books
There’s been a lot of chatter, books written, and hand-waving about the merging of humans and machines ever since the computer reared its digital head. From artificial intelligence and humanoid robots to microchip implants and uploading consciousness, the melding of biology and technology has been prophesized far and wide. Humans are indeed merging with machines,… Continue reading My Mother Was a Computer by N. Katherine Hayles and Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling
Even with as many texts as have come out exploring and explicating our so-called information age, there has yet to be a more exhaustive account of just what the hell has happened than Alan Liu’s The Laws of Cool (University of Chicago Press). Nevermind the misleading title. This isn’t another exposé on “cool hunting” and… Continue reading The Laws of Cool by Alan Liu
Ricocheting from such subjects as The Matrix to James Joyce, Prefiguring Cyberculture (MIT Press) is a dazzlingly ambitious compendium. As in any collection of essays, it is a mixed affair, however, given its scope, and despite the occasional lapse into impenetrable jargon, it is an important addition to the burgeoning world of cyber-theory. Roy ChristopherI… Continue reading Guest Post: Ashley Crawford on Prefiguring Cyberculture
