Friday, June 15, 2007

Cyber culture summer studies

Here is my summer reading list for cybercultural studies. I may try to develop a course with real programming and culture studies from this summer reading. What follows each bibliographic entry is from our libraries entry for the book:

Sonia E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, Arturo Escobar, eds. Cultures of politics/politics of cultures : re-visioning Latin American social movements (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998).

Contents The cultural politics of citizenship, democracy, and the state -- The cultural politics of ethnicity, race, and gender -- Globalization, transnationalism, and civil society -- Theoretical and methodological reflections on the cultural and the political in Latin American social movements.

Summary Investigating the complex interrelations between culture & politics in a wide range of social movements in Latin America, this book focuses on the cultural politics enacted by social movements as they struggle for new visions & practices of citizenship, democracy, social relations, & development. The volume explores the potential of these cultural politics for fostering alternative political cultures & social transformations. Theoretical & empirical chapters assess & build upon novel conceptions of culture & politics in a variety of disciplines & fields-particularly anthropology, political science, sociology, feminist theory, & cultural studies.


Sande Cohen, & R.L. Rutsky, eds., Consumption in an age of information (Oxford ; New York : Berg, 2005)

Summary We live in an age when consumption and consuming have come to define us. Consumption, now a global phenomenon, is so dominant it allows little room for alternatives. At the same time, information and digitization have become all-pervasive in our media culture. As ever greater aspects of the world have come to be seen as 'data', information has increasingly become the very currency of consumption.


Consumption in an Age of Information maps this new terrain. Bringing together some of the world's leading theorists and critics, the essays range across high theory and popular culture - from informational flows to science fiction simulations, from pop-cultural consumption to capitalism as religion, from the consumption of time to the role of 'speed' in contemporary culture. Book jacket.


Zillah Eisenstein Global obscenities : patriarchy, capitalism, and the lure of cyberfantasy (New York: New York University, 1998).

Contents Seeing : virtual globes and cyberpublics -- Viewing : media-ted seeing and cultural capitalism -- Talking : cyberfantasies and the relations of power -- Surviving : transnations, global capital, and families -- Wishing/hoping : Transnational capitalist patriachy, Beijing, and virtual sisterhoods.

Summary A noted feminist critic & political scientist investigates the effects of global capitalism & the new media explosion.

Jane Kenway, et al. Haunting the knowledge economy (London; New York: Routledge, 2006).

There is not much written about this book in the library entry only that this book falls in the sociology of knowledge field one field I read in and am learning on my own.

Wendy Harcourt & Arturo Escobar, eds. Women and the politics of place (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian, 2005).

Summary A team of researchers and activists in development, geography, women's rights, and related fields explore how women in place are living their lives at different levels of resistance and creativity in the face of what are often perceived to be overwhelming and largely abstract global forces. Case studies include Pakistan, Columbian black movement struggles, rural Finland, Zapatista women, and Palestine. Annotation :2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Webster, Frank, Theories of the information society (London; New York: Routledge, 2002).

There is really nothing written in the library card entry about this book. But this book does fall in the subjects of communication -- Social aspects; Communication -- Technological innovations; Information society; Information technology; Information policy.

David Morley & Kevin Robins, Spaces of identity : global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries (London ; New York : Routledge, 1995)
Again there is nothing much written in the library about this book but here is the subject info:

Subject:
Intercultural communication

Telecommunication -- Social aspects

Group identity

Computers and civilization

R.L. Rutsky, High technē: art and technology from the machine aesthetic to the posthuman (Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota, 1999)

Summary In an age of high tech, our experience of technology has changed tremendously, yet the definition of technology has remained largely unquestioned. High Techne redresses this gap in thinking about technology, examining the shifting relations of technology, art, and culture from the beginnings of modernity to contemporary technocultures.

Drawing on the Greek root of technology (techne, generally translated as "art, skill, or craft"), R. L. Rutsky challenges both the modernist notion of technology as an instrument or tool and the conventional idea of a noninstrumental aesthetics. Today, technology and aesthetics have again begun to come together: even basketball shoes are said to exhibit a "high-tech style" and the most advanced technology is called "state of the art." Rutsky charts the history and vicissitudes of this new high-tech techne up to our day -- from Fritz Lang to Octavia Butler, Thomas Edison to Japanese Anime, constructivism to cyberspace.

Progressing from the major art movements of modernism to contemporary science fiction and cultural theory, Rutsky provides clear and compelling evidence of a shift in the cultural conceptions of technology and art and demonstrates the centrality of technology to modernism and postmodernism.

I studied the first chapter in Thomas S Ferguson's course on large sample theory

Here is my work in for my notes on the weak law of large numbers. This is just Ferguson's first page and the defintion.

Student: Peter Timusk

From professor Thomas S Ferguson, UCLA

Laws of Large Numbers

converges in law to ,



if as n for all points x at which is continuous

Saturday, June 02, 2007