Trained in both classics and computer science, Bolter considers the cultural impact of computers on our age, comparing the computer to earlier technologies that redefined fundamental notions of time, space, language, memory, and human creativity. Surprisingly, he finds that in many ways the outlook of the computer age bears more resemblance to that of the ancient world than to that of the Enlightenment. The classical philosopher and the computer programmer share share a suspicion of infinity, an acceptance of necessary limitations on human achievement, and a belief that results are more important than motives.

Although Bolter fears that the growing use of computers may well diminish out culture's sense of the historical and intellectual context of human endeavor, he contends that the computer also offers new ways of looking at intellectual freedom, creativity, and the conservation of precious resources.

This volume, a veritable narrative tour through the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) at The Georgia Institute of Technology, is first and foremost a communal effort by all the faculty who decided to contribute essays on how they provide humanistic perspectives in a technological world in their research, teaching, and service activities.

In lively, mordantly witty prose, Negroponte decodes the mysteries—and debunks the hype—surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet, and explains why such touted innovations as the fax and the CD-ROM are likely to go the way of the BetaMax. "Succinct and readable. . . . If you suffer from digital anxiety . . . here is a book that lays it all out for you."—Newsday.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Ben Shneiderman's book dramatically raises computer users' expectations of what they should get from technology. He opens their eyes to new possibilities and invites them to think freshly about future technology. He challenges developers to build products that better support human needs and that are usable at any bandwidth. Shneiderman proposes Leonardo da Vinci as an inspirational muse for the "new computing." He wonders how Leonardo would use a laptop and what applications he would create.

Shneiderman shifts the focus from what computers can do to what users can do. A key transformation is to what he calls "universal usability," enabling participation by young and old, novice and expert, able and disabled. This transformation would empower those yearning for literacy or coping with their limitations. Shneiderman proposes new computing applications in education, medicine, business, and government. He envisions a World Wide Med that delivers secure patient histories in local languages at any emergency room and thriving million-person communities for e-commerce and e-government. Raising larger questions about human relationships and society, he explores the computer's potential to support creativity, consensus-seeking, and conflict resolution. Each chapter ends with a Skeptic's Corner that challenges assumptions about trust, privacy, and digital divides.

Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watchwords for our appreciation of Calvino himself.

What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, to each of five indispensable qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. A sixth lecture, on consistency, was never committed to paper, and we are left only to ponder the possibilities. With this book, he gives us the most eloquent defense of literature written in the twentieth century—a fitting gift for the next millennium.

This is an expanded edition of the first comprehensive overview of the work of Jean Baudrillard, one of the most fascinating thinkers on the French intellectual scene. To the original selection of his writings from 1968 to 1985, this new edition adds examples of Baudrillard’s work since that time.

Reviews of the First Edition

“This is a good book, and the author of its selected writings, Jean Baudrillard, deserves only a share of the compliment. It is difficult to introduce a difficult author, and Mark Poster has done a brilliant job. He has selected wisely from Baudrillard’s writings. . . . More important, Poster has written what may be, pound for pound, the best introduction to a social theorist I have read. . . . Poster has somehow said everything the uninitiated needs to know before deciding to read Baudrillard.”—Contemporary Sociology

“Following the lead of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, Baudrillard engages in a task of pointing away from any traditional sociological themes. His writings demand that one turn away from convenient or customary interpretations of society and, in the process, one is forced to use his or her imagination in new ways.”—Choice

“Poster’s Introduction presents what is probably as clear and intelligent an exposition of Baudrillard’s ideas as you’ll find anywhere.”—Philosophy and Literature

In the first in-depth exploration of fringe computer culture, Dery introduces readers to underground roboticists, cybersex enthusiasts, virtual-reality designers, cyberpunk novelists, and would-be cyborgs. In exploring this strange new world, Drey shifts the focus from the corporations that design the digital machines that are changing our reality to the fringes of cyberculture, where real-life cyberpunks are pursuing the bright promise of these technologies.

A fascinating tour of the past as it exists today, and of the dangers that threaten it, through incisive portraits of our attempts to maintain it: the high-tech struggles to save the Great Sphinx and the Ganges; the efforts to preserve Latin within the Vatican; the digital glut inside the National Archives, which may have caused more information to be lost than ever before; and an oral culture threatened by a "new" technology: writing itself. Stille explores not simply the past, but our ideas about the past―and how they will have to change if our past is to have a future.

foreword by Richard Saul Wurman

Information design is the newest of the design disciplines. As a sign of our times, when the crafting of messages and meaning is so central to our lives, information design is not only important—it is essential. Contemporary information designers seek to edify more than to persuade, to exchange more than to foist upon. With ever more powerful technologies of communication, we have learned that the issuer of designed information is as likely as the intended recipient to be changed by it, for better or worse.

The contributors to this book are both cautionary and hopeful as they offer visions of how information design can be practiced diligently and ethically, for the benefit of information consumers as well as producers. They present various methods that seem to work, such as sense-making and way-finding. They make recommendations and serve as guides to a still young but extraordinarily pervasive—and persuasive—field.

Contributors: Elizabeth Andersen, Judy Anderson, Simon Birrell, Mike Cooley, Brenda Dervin, Jim Gasperini, Yvonne M. Hansen, Steve Holtzman, Robert E. Horn, Robert Jacobson, John Krygier, Sheryl Macy, Romedi Passini, Jef Raskin, Chandler Screven, Nathan Shedroff, Hal Thwaites, Roger Whitehouse.

Computer technology is making possible new worlds of expression that are already being explored by a growing subculture of artists, musicians, virtual reality enthusiasts, and cyberpunks. In Digital Mantras, Steven Holtzman synthesizes ideas from a number of different disciplines to arrive at a new philosophy of creativity for the digital age.Blending ideas from music, computing, art, and philosophy, with biographical and historical anecdotes and a thread of mysticism, Holtzman gives us new ways to think about the integration of computers into the creative process. He shows how computers will change the way we create, and reveals the exciting potential for entirely new forms of expression. Running throughout the book are episodes from Holtzman's own sometimes mystical journey in search of the personal aesthetic he presents.Holtzman explores the presence and use of structure in fields as diverse as the development of ancient human languages, the philosophy of the Buddhist monk Nagarjuna and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, and the pioneering grammars of Panini and Noam Chomsky. He then turns to the use of computers for building abstract and virtual worlds in language, music, and art as well as virtual reality, and surveys the work of AI pioneer Terry Winograd, composers Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis, and artist Harold Cohen. Holtzman concludes by discussing the aesthetic implications of these new worlds. He introduces the concept of digital expression, along with examples that hint at its far-reaching possibilities.

In this day and age, cyberspace may seem an unlikely gateway for the soul. But, as science commentator Margaret Wertheim argues in this volume, cyberspace has become more and more a repository for immense spiritual yearning. Wertheim explores the underpinnings of this mapping of spiritual desire onto digitized space and suggests that the modem today has become a metaphysical escape-hatch from a materialism that many people find increasingly unsatisfying. In a journey through the history of space, Wertheim traces the combined story of physical space and spiritual space from the Middle Ages to the present, and shows how reality has come to be defined as the exclusive domain of the physical world. It is against this profoundly materialistic world that Wertheim persuades us of the appeal and ultimate failure of cyberspace to satisfy spiritual needs.