|
|
Product Description
When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media.
Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world.
A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence—from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google—The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us. Peters’s book will not only change how we think about media but provide a new appreciation for the day-to-day foundations of life on earth that we so often take for granted.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- A Prehistory of the Cloud (The MIT Press)
- Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Writing Science)
- Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
- Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
- Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
- Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
- A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
- The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
- Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
- Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious
*If this is not the "The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link
.
Details were last updated on Nov 8, 2024 11:11 +08.
