George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, July 1950. First printing by Signet, which I think makes it the first paperback printing of the book (if anyone knows of an earlier one, let me know; the hardback was first published the year before). I like this because covers of the book tend to be quite serious, if not ominous, given the cultural influence of the book, its use as a political warning, and its status as literature (cf. the second image, still somewhat overly dramatic, that of the 1960, 20^thprinting, also by Signet; the blurb on the back is basically the same on both, by the way). The 1950 edition frames it more as a "pulp" novel. What would reading it as pulp rather than portent do to what we make of the book?



And, for the heck of it, here is the first Penguin paperback printing from 1954 (when they rarely included images on covers).



I'm certainly not the first person to blog or write about this cover of Nineteen Eighty-Four. See, e.g., this piece in the New Yorker which discusses it within the rise of cheap paperbacks in the 1950s. Or this piece about sensationalist covers from the same era used to sell literary classics.

Yet more books

Less than two weeks to go until the start of semester, with a To-Do list as long as my arm, and these drop into my mailbox (OK, not unbidden, I did order them).

New books I really wish I had time to read right now:

Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Harvard.

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso.

Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command. Bloomsbury.

Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail:  Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity. Duke.

Pulp Surveillance

Of the more voyeuristic variety. 1963 (first paperback edition, originally published in 1961).

New Book

Just got a copy of Graham Harman's Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012, Zero Books) because I promised to write a paper on Lovecraft and Deleuze that's due next Fall. Harman's argument is that Lovecraft's work has presented a particular body of inspiration to the Speculative Realist philosophers. So it will be interesting to see what Harman makes of Lovecraft. I will be doing other things with Lovecraft, but that's all well and good. I actually began to realize that I really liked Deleuze and Guattari when I starting finding all the Lovecraft references in Mille Plateau.

New Visualities, New Technologies

My book, co-edited with Hille Koskela at the University of Finland, is now out! New Visualities, New Technologies: The New Ecstasy of Communication. Ashgate.

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409403579

Contents: Introduction: ecstatic assemblages of visuality, J. Macgregor Wise; Ecstatic updates: Facebook, identity and the fractal subject, Mark Nunes; Mapping Narbs, Ananda Mitra; Will the real digital girl please stand up?: examining the gap between policy dialogue and girls’ accounts of their digital existence, Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves; Vision, inertia, and the mobile telephone: on the origins of control space and the spread of sociopolitical cybernetics, John Armitage; 'Right to the image’: images of dignity, representations of humiliation, Hille Koskela; Frames of discontent: social media, mobile intimacy, and the boundaries of media practice, Larissa Hjorth; Creativity on display? Visibility conflicts or the claim for opacity as ethical resource, Ursula Anna Frohne; Performative pictures: camera phones at the ready, Brooke A. Knight; Mobile snapshots: pictorial communication in the age of tertiary orality, Dong-Hoo Lee; Sex, spectatorship, and the ‘Neda’ video: a biopsy, Theresa M. Senft; Index.

Geek Cred

1984: Behind the Scenes

Interesting article in the Telegraph on the biographical connections in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

New books

Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance (2013, Polity)

Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (2012, Wiley)

McKenzie Wark, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (2012, Polity)

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Given my interests in both old books and surveillance, this seemed a natural (if expensive) addition to the collection.

First printing, first American edition.

Another book

John Gilliom and Torin Monahan, SuperVision: An Introduction to Surveillance Society (2013, Chicago). A terrific undergraduate intro text to surveillance issues. Wish I was teaching a surveillance studies class this Spring.

New books

From Routledge:

James Elkins, What Photography Is (2010). A long dialogue with Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

Anthony Elliott and John Urry (2010). Mobile Lives.

Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund and Marisol Sandoval (eds) (2012) Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media.

Joseph Pugliese (2010) Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, and Biopolitics.

Jonathan Sterne (ed) (2012). The Sound Studies Reader.

Trebor Scholz (ed) (2013) Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory.

Other presses:

 

Jonathan Sterne (2012). MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke)

Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (2012) Life After New Media: Mediation as Vital Process. (MIT).

Andrew Ross on Phoenix

Can't wait for his next book, Bird on Fire, about Phoenix and (un)sustainability. Gotta wait until october, though.

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.

E-Readers (part 3, I think)

There's a nice piece in the NY Times about what electronic devices we should hang on to, and which our smart phones have made obsolete. It included this section:

BOOKS Keep them (with one exception). Yes, e-readers are amazing, and yes, they will probably become a more dominant reading platform over time, but consider this about a book: It has a terrific, high-resolution display. It is pretty durable; you could get it a little wet and all would not be lost. It has tremendous battery life. It is often inexpensive enough that, if you misplaced it, you would not be too upset. You can even borrow them free at sites called libraries.

New books

New books (in no particular order):

Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method (Duke, 2010). Which looks fabulous. Thinking of setting this as a text in next Fall's grad class: Globalization and Advocacy.

Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Prickly Paradigm, 2003).

Hardt & Negri, Commonwealth (Harvard, 2009). Playing with the idea of teaching this next Fall, too. But need to engage it more first.

Jussi Parikka, Insect Media (Minnesota, 2010). Thanks to Greg S. for the heads up on this one. Looks great, and quite useful as the Primer revisions continue.

Ben Highmore, A Passion for Cultural Studies (Palgrave, 2009) and The Design Culture Reader (2009, Routledge). [Thanks, Ben!]

Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense (Duke, 2010), which is brilliant.

and then there's the Affect Theory Reader (Duke, 2010) by a couple of people named Greg(g). :)

New Books

Just back from NCA. Picked up the following, which look great:

Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. NYU Press.

Thomas Streeter, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet. NYU Press.



Got in the mail the other day:

Ben Highmore, Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. Routledge. I had read this in manuscript form and loved it. Glad it's finally out.

new books

New books, accumulated over the last few months. Some purchased, and some just appeared in the mail (thank you!!) In no particular order.

Goggin & Hjorth, Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media. Routledge

Paul Virilio, The University of Disaster. Polity.

Campanella Bracken and Skalski (eds) Immersed in Media: Telepresence in Everyday Life. Routledge.

Solove, Understanding Privacy. Harvard.

Vivian, Public Forgetting. Penn State.

Papacharissi (ed), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture in Social Network Sites. Routledge.

Turner, Ordinary People in the Media.

Crow, Longford, & Sawchuk (eds), The Wireless Spectrum. University of Toronto Press.


Currently reading: Qui Xiaolong, Death of a Red Heroine, a mystery recommended by Jennifer (thanks!). Though I am also inching my way through both Against the Day (which is taking years, I realize, which is not necessarily the book's fault) and Vineland by Pynchon. Finished Inherent Vice, which was fun.

New Books

It's always a nice surprise when books appear, unbidden, in my mailbox. And if they are interesting and useful books, so much the better! So thanks to Oxford University Press for sending these on.

Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture looks great, chock full of interesting examples and approaches to television studies from economics to production to critical analysis. It makes me want to teach Television Studies again.

Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. A second edition of this excellent and influential text.

Books/Reading

Stack of last minute, late summer reading (less than 2 weeks before school starts).

Alva Noe, Out of Our Heads: Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. Hill & Wang, 2009. Just about done with this. Whereas Clark (below) still, in the end, separates consciousness from the world, Noe does not. Noe: "Notably, neither Clark not Chalmers has sympathy for the idea developed here that consciousness itself can be explained only if we make use of such an extended conception of the machinery of the mind" (p. 196)

Andy Clark, Supersizing the Miind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford, 2008.

Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The erosion of attention and the coming dark age. Prometheus Books, 2008. Got this last summer, but finally sitting down to work my way through it. It really brings in a broad range of research.

Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. The Penguin Press (2009).
Somewhat disappointed in this; it's more "lite" than Gallagher (which is more densely researched). Though as an argument for the need to pay attention in life, especially to others in one's life, to meditate, &c. it's a useful book.

Hal Niedzviecki, The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors. CityLights Books. Just starting on it; it seems a fun read. (Thanks to Greg S for the recommendation)

And I've been lapped by Thomas Pynchon. His latest, Inherent Vice, is on the bedside table. Just six pages, in, but it's reading fast and seems lots of fun. Meanwhile, I'm still only on p. 322 of his last one, Against the Day, which I really like, but don't get great swaths of time to read. 763 pages to go (and the font's a couple points smaller than Inherent Vice, too)!

Still haven't cracked Neal Stephenson's Anathem, and am just over halfway through Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: First Among Sequels, which doesn't quite have the spark of the earlier ones in the series. Every few months I pick it up and read a couple of chapters.