Winner, PROSE Award, Classics, Association of American Publishers (AAP), 2018
Writing down the epic tales of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus in texts that became the Iliad and the Odyssey was a defining moment in the intellectual history of the West, a moment from which many current conventions and attitudes toward books can be traced. But how did texts originally written on papyrus in perhaps the eighth century BC survive across nearly three millennia, so that today people can read them electronically on a smartphone?
Classics from Papyrus to the Internet provides a fresh, authoritative overview of the transmission and reception of classical texts from antiquity to the present. The authors begin with a discussion of ancient literacy, book production, papyrology, epigraphy, and scholarship, and then examine how classical texts were transmitted from the medieval period through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the modern era. They also address the question of reception, looking at how succeeding generations responded to classical texts, preserving some but not others. This sheds light on the origins of numerous scholarly disciplines that continue to shape our understanding of the past, as well as the determined effort required to keep the literary tradition alive. As a resource for students and scholars in fields such as classics, medieval studies, comparative literature, paleography, papyrology, and Egyptology, Classics from Papyrus to the Internet presents and discusses the major reference works and online professional tools for studying literary transmission.
Since the earliest days of our nation, new communications and transportation networks have enabled vast changes in how and where Americans live and work. Transcontinental railroads and telegraphs helped to open the West; mass media and interstate highways paved the way for suburban migration. In our own day, the internet and advanced logistics networks are enabling new changes on the landscape, with both positive and negative impacts on our efforts to conserve land and biodiversity. Emerging technologies have led to tremendous innovations in conservation science and resource management as well as education and advocacy efforts. At the same time, new networks have been powerful enablers of decentralization, facilitating sprawling development into previously undesirable or inaccessible areas.
Conservation in the Internet Age offers an innovative, cross-disciplinary perspective on critical changes on the land and in the field of conservation. The book:
TyAnna K. Herrington explains current intellectual property law and examines the effect of the Internet and ideological power on its interpretation. Promoting a balanced development of our national culture, she advocates educators’ informed participation in ensuring egalitarian public access to information. She discusses the control of information and the creation of knowledge in terms of the way control functions under current property law.
With the prevalence of disinformation geared to instill doubt rather than clarity, Creating Chaos Online unmasks disinformation when it attempts to pass as deliberation in the public sphere and distorts the democratic processes. Asta Zelenkauskaitė finds that repeated tropes justifying Russian trolling were found to circulate across not only all analyzed media platforms’ comments but also across two analyzed sociopolitical contexts suggesting the orchestrated efforts behind messaging. Through a dystopian vision of publics that are expected to navigate in the sea of uncertain both authentic and orchestrated content, pushed by human and nonhuman actors, Creating Chaos Online offers a concept of post-publics. The idea of post-publics is reflected within the continuum of treatment of public, counter public, and anti-public. This book argues that affect-instilled arguments used in public deliberation in times of uncertainty, along with whataboutism constitute a playbook for chaos online.
Since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, more than 300,000 lives have been lost in Darfur. Players of the video game Darfur Is Dying learn this sobering fact and more as they work to ensure the survival of a virtual refugee camp. The video game not only puts players in the position of a struggling refugee, it shows them how they can take action in the real world.
Creating the Witness examines the role of film and the Internet in creating virtual witnesses to genocide over the last one hundred years. The book asks, how do visual media work to produce witnesses—audiences who are drawn into action? The argument is a detailed critique of the notion that there is a seamless trajectory from observing an atrocity to acting in order to intervene. According to Leshu Torchin, it is not enough to have a camera; images of genocide require an ideological framework to reinforce the messages the images are meant to convey. Torchin presents wide-ranging examples of witnessing and genocide, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust (engaging film as witness in the context of the Nuremburg trials), and the international human rights organization WITNESS and its sustained efforts to use video to publicize human rights advocacy and compel action.
From a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s broad survey of media and the social practices around it investigates the development of popular understandings of genocide to achieve recognition and response—both political and judicial—ultimately calling on viewers to act on behalf of human rights.
The story of the Wire Act and how Robert Kennedy’s crusade against the Mob is creating a new generation of Internet gaming outlaws.Gambling has been part of American life since long before the existence of the nation, but Americans have always been ambivalent about it. What David Schwartz calls the “pell-mell history of legal gaming in the United States” is a testament to our paradoxical desire both to gamble and to control gambling. It is in this context that Schwartz examines the history of the Wire Act, passed in 1961 as part of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s crusade against organized crime and given new life in recent efforts to control Internet gambling. Cutting the Wire presents the story of how this law first developed, how it helped fight a war against organized crime, and how it is being used today. The Wire Act achieved new significance with the development of the Internet in the early 1990s and the growing popularity of online wagering through offshore facilities. The United States government has invoked the Wire Act in a vain effort to control gambling within its borders, at a time when online sports betting is soaring in popularity. By placing the Wire Act into the larger context of Americans’ continuing ambivalence about gambling, Schwartz has produced a provocative analysis of a national habit and the vexing predicaments that derive from it. In America today, 48 of 50 states currently permit some kind of legal gambling. Schwartz’s historical unraveling of the Wire Act exposes the illogic of an outdated law intended to stifle organized crime being used to set national policy on Internet gaming. Cutting the Wire carefully dissects two centuries of American attempts to balance public interest with the technology of gambling. Available in hardcover and paperback.
A clear explanation and provocative look at the impact of new technologies on world society.
Needing guidance and seeking insight, the Council of Europe approached Pierre Lévy, one of the world’s most important and well-respected theorists of digital culture, for a report on the state (and, frankly, the nature) of cyberspace. The result is this extraordinary document, a perfectly lucid and accessible description of cyberspace—from infrastructure to practical applications-along with an inspired, far-reaching exploration of its ramifications. A window on the digital world for the technologically timid, the book also offers a brilliant vision of the philosophical and social realities and possibilities of cyberspace for the adept and novice alike.
In an overview, Lévy discusses the distinguishing features of cyberspace and cyberculture from anthropological, philosophical, cultural, and sociological points of view. An optimist about the future potential of cyberspace, he eloquently argues that technology—and specifically the infrastructure of cyberspace, the Internet—can have a transformative effect on global society. Some of the issues he takes up are new art forms; changes in relationships to knowledge, education, and training; the preservation of linguistic and cultural differences; the emergence and implications of collective intelligence; the problems of social exclusion; and the impact of new technology on the city and democracy in general. In considerable detail, Lévy describes the ways in which cyberspace will help promote the growth of democracy, primarily through the participation of individuals or groups. His analysis is enlivened by his own personal impressions of cyberculture—garnered from bulletin boards, mailing lists, virtual reality demonstrations, and simulations. Immediate in its details, visionary in its scope, deeply informed yet free of unnecessary technical language, Cyberculture is the book we require in our digital age.Reconceptualizes the relationship between participatory democracy, technology, and space
The Internet has been billed by some proponents as an "electronic agora" ushering in a "new Athenian age of democracy." That assertion assumes that cyberspace’s virtual environment is compatible with democratic practice. But the anonymous sociality that is intrinsic to the Internet seems at odds with theories of democracy that presuppose the possibility, at least, of face-to-face meetings among citizens. The Internet, then, raises provocative questions about democratic participation: Must the public sphere exist as a physical space? Does citizenship require a bodily presence?
In Cybering Democracy, Diana Saco boldly reconceptualizes the relationship between democratic participation and spatial realities both actual and virtual. She argues that cyberspace must be viewed as a produced social space, one that fruitfully confounds the ordering conventions of our physical spaces. Within this innovative framework, Saco investigates recent and ongoing debates over cryptography, hacking, privacy, national security, information control, and Internet culture, focusing on how different online practices have shaped this particular social space. In the process, she highlights fundamental issues about the significance of corporeality in the development of civic-mindedness, the exercise of citizenship, and the politics of collective action.Uncovering the class conflicts, geopolitical dynamics, and aggressive capitalism propelling the militarization of the internet
Global surveillance, computational propaganda, online espionage, virtual recruiting, massive data breaches, hacked nuclear centrifuges and power grids—concerns about cyberwar have been mounting, rising to a fever pitch after the alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Although cyberwar is widely discussed, few accounts undertake a deep, critical view of its roots and consequences.
Analyzing the new militarization of the internet, Cyberwar and Revolution argues that digital warfare is not a bug in the logic of global capitalism but rather a feature of its chaotic, disorderly unconscious. Urgently confronting the concept of cyberwar through the lens of both Marxist critical theory and psychoanalysis, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko provide a wide-ranging examination of the class conflicts and geopolitical dynamics propelling war across digital networks.
Investigating the subjectivities that cyberwar mobilizes, exploits, and bewilders, and revealing how it permeates the fabric of everyday life and implicates us all in its design, this book also highlights the critical importance of the emergent resistance to this digital militarism—hacktivism, digital worker dissent, and off-the-grid activism—for effecting different, better futures.
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