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| Resources: Society
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Battelle,
John The Search: How Google and Its Rivals
Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed
Our Culture. Portfolio
Hardcover (2005)
Rather than write a book strictly about the rise
of Google as a business, technology journalist
Battelle targets his research on the concept of
Internet search, beginning the book with a discussion
of an abstract idea he terms the "Database
of Intentions," defined as the sum total of
all queries that pour into search engines daily,
revealing the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of
our culture. Though most of the book is devoted
to the search engine giant (which Battelle reports
corners 51 percent of the search engine market),
the author also includes chapters on "Search,
Before Google" and the "Who, What, Where,
Why, When. And How (much)" of search. Battelle
is at his best when describing the creation of
Google, especially through the yin-yang personalities
of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and
in describing the company's culture. (from Publishers
Weekly) |
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Kaplan, David
A. The Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams.
Harper Perennial. 2000
Kaplan's book is a history of the Valley, from the time when Stanford professor
Frederick Terman encouraged David Packard and Bill Hewlett to establish their
own company to when Sequoia Capital invested $1 million in a startup founded
by Jerry Yang and David Filo. In between are the many Valley legends, including
Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Kleiner Perkins, Apple, Oracle, and Netscape--as
well as some of its most notable failures and tragedies, such as William Shockley
and Gary Kildall. While the book begins with the opulence of Woodside, California,
it ends surprisingly enough in Portland, Maine, with Bob Metcalfe, founder of
3Com, who fled the Valley for something "fresher" and "more alive."
As he traces the short history of the area, Kaplan, a senior writer at Newsweek,
detects a not-so-subtle change in its values. He writes, "Nobody appears
to be having quite as good a time in Silicon Valley. Passions have become mere
professions; impulsiveness is now compulsiveness.... The Valley once was a new
machine. It changed the world. It may do so yet again. But the machine has no
soul anymore." Here's a thoughtful and colorful read for anyone interested
in one of the most dynamic places on the planet. --Harry C. Edwards |
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Ryan, John and
Alan Durning. Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday
Things. Northwest Environment.
1997
Documenting a day in the life of the average North American consumer, Stuff:
The Secret Lives of Everyday Things deconstructs the American Dream by unraveling
the hidden costs behind the objects around us. From our morning cup of Columbian
coffee to our South Korean-made sneakers, the book traces the environmental impact
of the consumer decisions most of us make without thinking. Authors John C. Ryan
and Alan Thein Durning of Seattle's Northwest Environment Watch tell us greenhouse
gases produced in making one burger are equivalent to those emitted in a six-mile
drive to the burger joint. Only occasionally verging on preachiness, this readable
88-page book is definitely worth the paper it's printed on. (from Mother Jones,
September/October 1997) |
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Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity
at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1996
The world is growing smaller. Every day we hear this idea expressed and witness
its reality in our lives—through the people we meet, the products we buy,
the foods we eat, and the movies we watch. In this bold look at the cultural
effects of a shrinking world, leading cultural theorist Arjun Appadurai places
these challenges and pleasures of contemporary life in a broad global perspective.
Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity
at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world,
providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to
the nation-state, whose era some see as coming to an end. Appadurai examines
the current epoch of globalization, which is characterized by the twin forces
of mass migration and electronic mediation, and provides fresh ways of looking
at popular consumption patterns, debates about multiculturalism, and ethnic violence.
He considers the way images—of lifestyles, popular culture, and self-representation—circulate
internationally through the media and are often borrowed in surprising (to their
originators) and inventive fashions.
Appadurai simultaneously explores and explodes boundaries—between how we
imagine the world and how that imagination influences our self-understanding,
between social institutions and their effects on the people who participate in
them, between nations and peoples that seem to be ever more homogeneous and yet
ever more filled with differences. Modernity at Large offers a path
to move beyond traditional oppositions between culture and power, tradition and
modernity, global and local, pointing out the vital role imagination plays in
our construction of the world of today—and tomorrow. (University of Minnesota
Press) |
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Appadurai, Arjun,
ed. Globalization. Duke
University Press, 2001
This second installment of Public Culture’s Millennial Quartet seeks to
intervene in the increasingly heated debates surrounding the cultural dimensions
of globalization, which includes debates about what globalization is and whether
it is a meaningful term. The volume focuses in particular on the way that changing
sites—local, regional, diasporic—are the scenes of emergent forms
of sovereignty in which matters of style, sensibility, and ethos articulate new
legalities and new kinds of violence.
Seeking an alternative to the dead-end debate between those who see globalization
as a phenomenon wholly without precedent and those who see it simply as modernization,
imperialism, or global capitalism with a new face, the contributors seek to illuminate
how space and time are transforming each other in special ways in the present
era. They examine how this complex transformation involves changes in the situation
of the nation, the state, and the city. While exploring distinct regions—China,
Africa, South America, Europe—and representing different disciplines and
genres—anthropology, literature, political science, sociology, music, cinema,
photography—the contributors are concerned with both the political economy
of location and the locations in which political economies are produced and transformed.
A special strength of the collection is its concern with emergent styles of subjectivity,
citizenship, and mobilization and with the transformations of state power through
which market rationalities are distributed and embodied locally. (Amazon-book
description) |
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Bernheimer,
Charles, ed. Comparative Literature in the
Age of Multiculturalism.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP,
1995
In recent years, the idea of multiculturalism has become a powerful--and controversial--influence
in a variety of social and cultural territories. In the academic world it has
profoundly influenced curriculum and scholarship in the humanities, particularly
in traditionally Eurocentric disciplines such as comparative literature.
It was hardly surprising, then, that the 1993 report "Comparative Literature
at the Turn of the Century"--which endorses a multicultural orientation
for the discipline--generated an unprecedented level of interest. The third such
report on professional standards issued by the American Comparative Literature
Association since 1965, it continues to be the subject of lively discussion and
debate. At issue is not only the definition of a discipline but also the cultural
function of literary study in general. This book brings together the three ACLA
reports (issued in 1965, 1975, and 1993), three responses to the latest report
presented at the 1993 MLA convention (by K. Anthony Appiah, Mary Louise Pratt,
and Michael Riffaterre), and thirteen additional position papers by prominent
scholars in the humanities. (Amazon-book description) |
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Bird, Jon et.
al. eds. Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures,
Global Change. London:
Routledge. 1993
This collection offers radical reformulations of cultural theory in response
to political, economic and technological change. In particular it focuses on
the intellectual project of speculating on the future. (Amazon-book description) |
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Cohen, Robin. Global
Diasporas: An Introduction.
Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997
Clearly, not all international migration gives rise to diasporas. But in Global
Diasporas: An Introduction, Cohen wants to enlarge the scope of the latter
term to include populations that, unlike the Jews and Armenians, have not suffered
catastrophic traumas. He argues that there are nine common features of a diaspora,
which serve to demarcate the scope of his inquiry. He then generates a typology
to classify diasporas according to their prevalent nature--"victims," such
as the Armenians; "labor," such as Indian contract workers; "trade," such
as Lebanese merchants in West Africa; "imperial," such as British population
movements to overseas dominions; and "cultural," such as Caribbeans
living abroad. He notes that conditions surrounding diaspora communities evolve
through time, so that groups like the Jews comprise several types. The typology
structures the book. Successive chapters are devoted to comparisons of at least
two diaspora populations according to type, save for the chapter on cultural
diasporas. (Mark Miller, University of Delaware) |
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Cvetkovich,
Ann, and Douglas Kellner. Articulating the
Global and the Local:
Globalization and Cultural Studies.
Boulder: Westview P, 1997
This book explores how discourses of tile local, tilt particular, the everyday,
and the situated are being transformed by new discourses of globalization and
transnationalism, as used both by government and business and in critical academic
discourse, Unlike other studies that have focused on the politics and economics
of globalization, Articulating the Global and the Local highlights the importance
of culture and provides models for a cultural studies that addresses globalization
and the dialectic of local and global forces.Arguing for the inseparability of
global and local analysis, the book demonstrates how global forces enter into
local situations and how ill turn global relations are articulated through local
events, identities, and cultures; it includes studies of a wide range of cultural
forms including sports, poetry, pedagogy ecology, dance, cities, and democratic
Articulating the Global and the Local makes tile ambitious claim that the category
of the local transforms the debate about globalization by redefining what counts
its global culture. Central to tile essays are the new global and translocal
cultures and identities created by the diasporic processes of colonialism and
decolonization. The essays explore a variety of local, national, and transnational
contexts with particular attention to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality
as categories that force us to rethink globalization itself. (Amazon-book description) |
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Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational
Connections: Culture, People, Places. London:
Routledge, 1996
Transnational Connections provides
a lucid account of culture in an age of globalization,
arguing that, in an increasingly interconnected
world, national understandings of culture
have become insufficient. He explores the
implications of boundary-crossings and long-distance
cultural flows for established notions of "the
local", "community," "nation" and "modernity," engaging
not only theoretical debates about culture
and globalization but issues of how we think
and live today. (Amazon-book description) |
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Jameson,
Frederic, and Masao Miyoshi, eds. The Cultures
of Globalization. Durham:
Duke UP, 1998
A pervasive force that evades easy analysis, globalization has come to represent
the export and import of culture, the speed and intensity of which has increased
to unprecedented levels in recent years. The Cultures of Globalization presents
an international panel of intellectuals who consider the process of globalization
as it concerns the transformation of the economic into the cultural and vice
versa; the rise of consumer culture around the world; the production and cancellation
of forms of subjectivity; and the challenges it presents to national identity,
local culture, and traditional forms of everyday life.
Discussing overlapping themes of transnational
consequence, the contributors to this volume
describe how the global character of technology,
communication networks, consumer culture, intellectual
discourse, the arts, and mass entertainment have
all been affected by recent worldwide trends.
Appropriate to such diversity of material, the
authors approach their topics from a variety
of theoretical perspectives, including those
of linguistics, sociology, economics, anthropology,
and the law. Essays examine such topics as free
trade, capitalism, the North and South, Eurocentrism,
language migration, art and cinema, social fragmentation,
sovereignty and nationhood, higher education,
environmental justice, wealth and poverty, transnational
corporations, and global culture. Bridging the
spheres of economic, political, and cultural
inquiry, The Cultures of Globalization brings
crucial insight into many of the most significant
changes occurring in today's world. This volume
will inform readers interested in current and
future global challenges and those intellectuals
involved in cultural, postcolonial, and neocolonial
studies in various regions of the world from
Latin America to Africa, Asia/Pacific, and the
Middle East. (From Google Book Search) |
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Lanham, Richard. The
Electronic Eye: Democracy, Technology, and
the Arts. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1993.
In this heady glimpse at an electronic universe, UCLA English professor Lanham
contends that the digitized text of the computer screen offers a richer, more
complex perceptual field than the printed book. He further claims that interactive
electronic text creates a playful, creative medium akin to the rhetoric of the
ancient Greeks. In Lanham's scenario, rhetoric was an open-ended pattern of Western
education that was supplanted by Newtonian thought and the printed book. These
academic essays grandiosely maintain that digitized technology can democratize
higher education, open up the arts to a full range of human talent and foster
a convergence between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities.
Lanham surveys interactive novels, video-and-text programs for business and government,
electronic textbooks and common ground between the computer and the aesthetics
of futurism, dada and postmodern visual art. (From Publisher’s Weekly) |
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Kaplan, Caren. Questions
of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement.
Durham: Duke UP, 1996
This rhetorically powerful book, appearing in a series edited by Stanley Fish
and Fredric Jameson called "Post-Contemporary Interventions," is an
informative detour around recent theory as well as a useful alternative guide
for scholars of modernism and its outposts, including postcolonial studies, feminist
studies, and cultural-materialist analyses. Kaplan's attention to the material
and historical underpinnings of theories and practices of travel is a valuable
extension of the often unsituated discussions of exile, displacement, and diaspora
we find in contemporary discussions. Questions of Travel maps both a "post-postmodernist" and
feminist semiotics of "movement" that locates the off-site markers
and the significations of power emerging from class, race, and gender struggles.
Kaplan's decisive critique of Jean Baudrillard's colonial recuperation of the
aestheticist distance in traveling is as powerful as her elaborate critique of
traveling theorists such as Edward Said, James Clifford, and Gilles Deleuze,
who, in Kaplan's view, each shift their terms of critical practice beyond modernist
travels, but who still reproduce "modernist exile formations in the midst
of a postmodern articulation." She takes, in particular, Clifford's theories
of cosmopolitan hybridity to task on the grounds of repressed class, gender,
and geographical differences. (Carmen Faymonville-University of Wisconsin, Platteville) |
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King, Anthony
D., ed. Culture, Globalization and the World-System:
Contemporary Conditions for the Representation
of Identity. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1997
A foundational work in the study of the globalization of culture. First published
in 1991, Culture, Globalization and the World-System is one of the inaugural
books discussing the increasing tendency of cultural practices to cross national
boundaries. Now widely available in the United States for the first time and
updated with a new preface, these influential essays by a distinguished group
of scholars and cultural critics lay the groundwork for a vital and exciting
new field of inquiry. Culture, Globalization and the World-System views
culture through different prisms and categories—including race, gender,
ethnicity, class, and nation. The contributors consider how socially organized
systems of meaning are produced and represented. Drawing from sociology, art
history, film studies, and anthropology, these essays—many of them representing
their authors' only treatment of globalization—provide paradigms for understanding
cultures and the representation of identity in "the world as a single place." (University
of Minnesota Press) |
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Lechner, Frank
and John Boli, eds. The Globalization Reader.
Blackwell, 2000
Contains a wide variety of texts illuminating political, economic, cultural,
and individual dimensions of globalization. The book illustrates key issues in
public and scholarly debate about globalization. (book description)
Complementary website: http://www.sociology.emory.edu/globalization/ |
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Morley, David
and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global
Media, Electronic,
Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries.
London: Routledge, 1995
We are living through a time when old identities - nation, culture and gender
are melting down. Spaces of Identity examines the ways in which collective cultural
identities are being reshaped under conditions of a post-modern geography and
a communications environment of cable and satellite broadcasting. To address
current problems of identity, the authors look at contemporary politics between
Europe and its most significant others: America; Islam and the Orient. They show
that it's against these places that Europe's own identity has been and is now
being defined. A stimulating account of the complex and contradictory nature
of contemporary cultural identities. (Amazon-book description) |
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Robertson,
Roland. Globalization.
London: Sage P, 1992
The global society. Today everyone from scholars to politicians is debating the
nature and makeup of a global society. But what is actually meant by a global
society? Does such a global society actually exist? In Globalization, Roland
Robertson argues that the real nature of globalization is obscured while peripheral
concerns, such as minute economic analyses, are overstated. Robertson presents
an alternative view that incorporates the economic and cultural aspects of the
global scene, and in the process connects general social structures to historical
developments in the modern world. Offering a distinctively cultural focus on
the social theory of the contemporary world, Globalization makes a major contribution
to the current debate for graduate students and professors of sociology, social
theory, and cultural studies. "A professor of sociology at the University
of Pittsburgh, Roland Robertson is, as this book proves, the foremost sociologist
engaged in the study of globalization. . . . Although empirical data crop up
only occasionally, this book offers a sweeping yet detailed survey of the ways
in which sociologists have dealt with the subject. Indeed, Robertson shows in
a brief history of his discipline, sociology has been a key element in the effort
to come to grips with what he calls "globality"; sociologists have
crucially helped to shape global awareness. . . . All told, this is a difficult
book, but one worthy of careful reading as a stimulant for raising global awareness" (Journal
of World History) |
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Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary
Homelands. New York:
Viking, 1991
Rushdie calls his controversial novel The Satanic Verses "a migrant's-eye
view of the world," and indeed the theme of cultural transplantation informs
many of the 75 essays and reviews gathered in this impressive collection. Whether
he is analyzing racial prejudice in Britain or surveying an India riven by fundamentalism
and politics of religious hatred, he writes as an impartial observer, a citizen
of the world. Subtle and witty, these concise, eloquent pieces are a pleasure
to read. (From Publisher’s Weekly) |
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Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism.
New York: Vintage, 1994
The author of Orientalism examines the interrelationship
of Occidental literature and imperialism from
the 17th century to the Gulf war. (From Publisher’s
Weekly) |
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Boundaries of Change (1997) Dir. Michael Simpson. 26 minutes.
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/wwl7.html
From Ways We Live: Exploring Community Series. Richmond, VA copes with a recent wave of Asian immigration, accepting change while retaining community. |
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The New Rulers of the World (2001) Dir. Alan Lowery. 53 minutes.
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/new.html
Journalist John Pilger investigates Indonesia as a microcosm of the effects of globalization around the world. |
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The Spectre of Hope (2001) Dir. Paul Carlin. 52 minutes.
http://www.frif.com/new2002/spect.html
Critic and writer John Berger discusses photographer Sebastião Salgado’s portraits of people around the world who have been forced from their homes and traditions to cities and refugee camps. |
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