Inhuman Networks

Download Inhuman Networks PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Inhuman Networks book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Undoing Networks

Exploring and conceptualizing practices, technologies, and politics of disconnecting How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: “digital detox” is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life. Self-help books advocate “digital minimalism” to recover authentic experiences of the offline. Artists envision a world without the internet. Activists mobilize against the expansion of the 5G network. If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores nonusage and the “right to disconnect” from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism.
Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures

The tale of twins being reunited after a long separation is a trope that has been endlessly repeated and reworked across different cultures and throughout history, with each moment adapting the twin plot to address its current cultural tensions. In this study, Edward King demonstrates how twins are a means of exploring the social implications of hyper-connectivity and the compromising relationship between humans and digital information, their environment and their genetics. As King demonstrates, twins tell us about the changing forms of connectivity and power in contemporary culture and what new conceptions of the human they present us with. Taking account of a broad range of literary, cultural and scientific practices, Entwined Being probes discussions surrounding twins such as: - The way in which they appear in behavioral genetics as a way of identifying inherited predispositions to social media - How their faces interrupt biometric interfaces such as facial recognition software and undermine advances in neo-liberal surveillance systems - How they represent the uncanny and the weird in the horror genre and how this questions ideologies of communications media and the connectivity it enables - Their association with telepathy and cybernetics in science fiction - Their construction as models for entangled being in ecological thought Drawing upon the literary and filmic works of Ken Follet, Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Bruce Chatwin, Shelley Jackson, Brian de Palma, Peter Greenway and David Cronenberg, as well as science fiction literature and the television series Orphan Black, King illuminates how twins are employed across a range of disciplines to envision a critical re-conception of the human in times of digital integration and ecological crisis.
Sociology Beyond Societies

In this ground-breaking contribution to social theory, John Urry argues that the traditional basis of sociology - the study of society - is outmoded in an increasingly borderless world. If sociology is to make a pertinent contribution to the post societal era it must forget the social rigidities of the pre-global order and, instead, switch its focus to the study of both physical and virtual movement. In considering this sociology of mobilities, the book concerns itself with the travels of people, ideas, images, messages, waste products and money across international borders, and the implications these mobilities have to our experiences of time, space, dwelling and citizenship. Sociology Beyond Society extends recent debate about globalisation both by providing an analysis of how mobilities reconstitute social life in uneven and complex ways, and by arguing for the significance of objects, senses, and time and space in the theorising of contemporary life. This book will be essential reading for undergraduates and graduates studying sociology and cultural geography.