Customer Reviews

Exploring Technology and Social Space (New Media Cultures)

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This book deftly examines several strands of dense cultural, philosophical, social, and technology studies theory--articulating useful connections and providing concise synopses of bodies of work that would take months to read. For that reason alone this book will be cited often in years to come. But the book does so much more that is interesting. Building on Kant and Hegel, Wise develops a definition of modernist epistemology and shows how our understanding of and relationships with technology are freighted with this epistemology. Drawing on Donna Harraway's cyborg writings, he pushes towards an amodern epistemology which attributes agency to both humans and other cultural/technological actors, blurring the lines, as Harraway would have it, between organism and technology. His work also strongly depends on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to articulate a two-pronged agency: corpreal agency which is manifested in technology, and incorporeal agency which is manifested in language. This amodern description of agency both in terms of technology and language is an important move that should be of great interest to scholars of the rhetoric of science, cultural studies, and philosophy of science. He recasts a dozen or so theories in ways that will have the reader scribbling ideas in the margins.