New books

Three brand-spankin' new books arrived today. Two of which challenge notions of humanity:

Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz (2011) The Techno-Human Condition. MIT Press.

Dominic Pettman (2011) Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines. University of Minnesota Press.

Both of which look to be quite lively, interesting reads. Really wish I could set everything aside this weekend and read, but that's not going to happen.

The third book just appeared in my mailbox (which is always a nice thing). Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers. Edited by Terry Clark.University of Chicago Press, 2010 (originally published 1969). I'm not really familiar with Tarde, except that Latour in Reassembling the Social returns to Tarde quite a bit.

New books

Just received a copy of The New Media and Technocultures Reader, Edited by Seth Giddings and Martin Lister (2011, Routledge). This looks like a great collection, with a nice variety of pieces (including, truth be told, an excerpt of one of mine, which is how I got a copy). It's meant as a companion volume to New Media: A Critical Introduction, by Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly.

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why we expect more from Technology and less from each other. Basic Books. Should be an interesting read in terms of the balance of technological determinism and cultural/social determinism.

W. Brian Arthur (2009) The Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves. Free Press. For the life of me, I can't remember why I ordered this from Amazon (except it didn't cost much and seemed an interesting, recent example of evolutionary and essentialist terms for technology).

Daniel Chandler (2007) Semiotics: The Basics (2nd edition). Routledge. Wanted to see what was new here. Might use it for class in the Fall.