The Arbiters of Reality


Book Description

The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture disrupts our critical sense of nineteenth-century American literature by examining the storytelling strategies of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in light of an emerging information industry. Peter West reveals how these writers invoked telegraphic and penny press journalism, daguerreotypy, and moving panoramas in their fiction to claim for themselves a privileged access to a reality beyond the reach of a burgeoning mass audience. Locating Hawthorne and Melville in vivid and overlooked contexts--the Salem Murder scandal of 1830, which transformed Hawthorne's quiet city into a media-manufactured spectacle, and Melville's New York City of 1846-47, where the American Telegraph was powerfully articulating a nation at war--West portrays the romance as a reactive, deeply rhetorical literary form and a rich historical artifact. In the early twenty-first century, it has become a postmodern cliché to place the word "reality" in scare quotes. The Arbiters of Reality suggests that attending to the construction of the real in public life is more than simply a language of critique: it must also be understood as a specific kind of romantic self-invention.




The Arbiters of Reality


Book Description

The Arbiters of Reality: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Rise of Mass Information Culture disrupts our critical sense of nineteenth-century American literature by examining the storytelling strategies of both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in light of an emerging information industry. Peter West reveals how these writers invoked telegraphic and penny press journalism, daguerreotypy, and moving panoramas in their fiction to claim for themselves a privileged access to a reality beyond the reach of a burgeoning mass audience.Locating Hawthorne and Melville in vivid and overlooked contexts-the Salem Murder scandal of 1830, which transformed Hawthorne's quiet city into a media-manufactured spectacle, and Melville's New York City of 1846-47, where the American Telegraph was powerfully articulating a nation at war-West portrays the romance as a reactive, deeply rhetorical literary form and a rich historical artifact. In the early twenty-first century, it has become a postmodern cliche to place the word "reality" in scare quotes. The Arbiters of Reality suggests that attending to the construction of the real in public life is more than simply a language of critique: it must also be understood as a specific kind of romantic self-invention."




The Reality Game


Book Description

Fake news posts and Twitter trolls were just the beginning. What will happen when misinformation moves from our social media feeds into our everyday lives? Online disinformation stormed our political process in 2016 and has only worsened since. Yet as Samuel Woolley shows in this urgent book, it may pale in comparison to what's to come: humanlike automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality, and more. These technologies have the power not just to manipulate our politics, but to make us doubt our eyes and ears and even feelings. Deeply researched and compellingly written, The Reality Game describes the profound impact these technologies will have on our lives. Each new invention built without regard for its consequences edges us further into this digital dystopia. Yet Woolley does not despair. Instead, he argues pointedly for a new culture of innovation, one built around accountability and especially transparency. With social media dragging us into a never-ending culture war, we must learn to stop fighting and instead prevent future manipulation. This book shows how we can use our new tools not to control people but to empower them.




The Last Individual


Book Description

There pervades today, a disturbing zealotry with which the sociopolitical culture has imagined for itself a prerogative to divest the individual of his rightful sovereignty and discretion, and to foist upon him an often-arbitrary excess of compulsions and impositions. What seems to be emerging in contemporary life is a mentality that could be described as a sociomaniacal cult. The world is presently marked by an ever-increasing bias toward extending unduly-and often illegitimately-a superfluity of external authorities over the individual. With astonishing insolence and arrogance, the illuminati establishment presumes to righteously dispossess individuals of their sovereignty, and to coerce them according to its particular vision of moral rectitude. The individual per se is being destroyed-swallowed up by an obsessive ideology of obligatory symbiotic unity. The nexus of authority has become so bastardized by the operation of the sociomaniac's delusional confidence in particular utopian collective visions that little remains of individual man. What does remain is the social automaton: the docile dependent of a paternalistic, illuminati ruling-class, which assumes exclusively for itself the functions of cognition and volition, and the privileged status as 'Homo-Sapien zookeeper.' The Last Individual reflects upon this theme of compulsory hyper-sociality through a collection of ruminations and ponderings involving the individual, his sovereignty, and his relationship to the world around him. It also considers the underlying componentry of ideological perspectives in general since the soundness of any ideological outlook depends on the foundation of assumptions supporting it. The material herein represents an ideological collage intended to induce or facilitate the meandering of the reader's mind through the complex of issues relating to the tensions between individual voluntaryism and communal coercivism.




Reality TV


Book Description

This book is a study of the 'Reality TV' format which, in less than a decade, has transformed network programming schedules, branded satellite and digital stations, become a favourite target for anti-television campaigners, and turned viewers into savvy r




The Return of Gandhi


Book Description

“The Return of Gandhi”, in my opinion, rightly predicts that the Mahatma would not sit around and mourn the loss of his legacy. Rather, he would travel this great land, see, learn and understand. And he would then spring to action. Dalits and Adivasis constitute the very heart of Indian society and their pain resonated deeply with Gandhi and he saw their upliftment simply as the pursuit of justice. In the course of my work with the United Nations, I have seen just how large an impact Gandhi left on the world. I recall a youth in a totalitarian country once asking me, “You had Gandhi…who do we have?”. In his words was a fervent longing for a leader who spoke to the masses of his country and for an example that he could identify with. I was barely surprised when his country had a non-violent revolution a year later. For whenever Gandhi is remembered, his spirit returns. Dr Vizai Bhaskar’s Gandhi vows to “lift India from the quick sand of political delinquency and the slush of corruption and dishonesty” to “the solid rock of political and economic Justice”. He promises to return, to protect the persecuted, “the good and the innocent”, and to become the “body, mind and soul of the common man”. Indians may give up Gandhi’s ways, but let us pray that Gandhi will never give up on India. - Raja Karthikeya. Diplomat, United Nations




The Other Side of Truth


Book Description

In The Other Side of Truth, filmmaker Paul Kimball crosses the Rubicon of the imagination to explore the idea that what we call the 'paranormal' is actually a form of artistic expression created by an advanced non-human intelligence to inspire us to think about who we are, where we have been, and where we are going. Using his own journey of discovery as the starting point, Kimball presents the 'other side of truth' - the world not as we have been told it is, but as we are being encouraged to imagine that it could become.




YOUR WORD IS TRUTH


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Telegraphies


Book Description

Telegraphies explores literatures envisioning the literary, societal, even the perceived metaphysical effects of various cultures' telecommunications technologies, to argue that nineteenth-century Americans tested in the virtual realm new theories of self, place, nation, and god. The book opens by discussing such Native American telecommunications technologies as smoke signals and sign language chains, to challenge common notions that long-distance speech practices emerged only in conjunction with capitalist industrialization. Kay Yandell analyzes the cultural interactions and literary productions that arose as Native telegraphs worked with and against European American telecommunications systems across nineteenth-century America. Into this conversation Telegraphies integrates visions of Morse's electromagnetic telegraph, with its claim to speak new, coded words and to send bodiless, textless prose instantly across the miles. Such writers as Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, and Ella Cheever Thayer crafted memoirs, poetic odes, and novels that envision how the birth of instantaneous communication across a vast continent forever alters the way Americans speak, write, build community, and conceive of the divine. While some writers celebrated far-speaking technologies as conduits of a metaphysical Manifest Destiny to overspread America's primitive cultures, others revealed how telecommunication could empower previously silenced voices to range free in the disembodied virtual realm, even as bodies remained confined by race, class, gender, disability, age, or geography. Ultimately, Telegraphies broadens the way literary scholars conceive of telecommunications technologies while providing a rich understanding of similarities between literatures often considered to have little in common.