| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||

› Find signed collectible books: 'After Image: Mind-Altering Marketing'
More editions of After Image: Mind-Altering Marketing:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Art at the Turn of the Millennium'
More editions of Art at the Turn of the Millennium:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Art Now'
More editions of Art Now:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Art Now'
More editions of Art Now:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Art Now: Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium'
More editions of Art Now: Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Being Digital'
As the founder of MIT's Media Lab and a popular columnist for Wired, Nicholas Negroponte has amassed a following of dedicated readers. Negroponte's fans will want to get a copy of Being Digital, which is an edited version of the 18 articles he wrote for Wired about "being digital."
Negroponte's text is mostly a history of media technology rather than a set of predictions for future technologies. In the beginning, he describes the evolution of CD-ROMs, multimedia, hypermedia, HDTV (high-definition television), and more. The section on interfaces is informative, offering an up-to-date history on visual interfaces, graphics, virtual reality (VR), holograms, teleconferencing hardware, the mouse and touch-sensitive interfaces, and speech recognition.
In the last chapter and the epilogue, Negroponte offers visionary insight on what "being digital" means for our future. Negroponte praises computers for their educational value but recognizes certain dangers of technological advances, such as increased software and data piracy and huge shifts in our job market that will require workers to transfer their skills to the digital medium. Overall, Being Digital provides an informative history of the rise of technology and some interesting predictions for its future. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Bots: The Origin of New Species'
More editions of Bots: The Origin of New Species:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society'
More editions of Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide'
Henry Jenkins at Authors@Google (video)
Winner of the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award
2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
Convergence Culture maps a new territory: where old and new media intersect, where grassroots and corporate media collide, where the power of the media producer and the power of the consumer interact in unpredictable ways.
Henry Jenkins, one of Americas most respected media analysts, delves beneath the new media hype to uncover the important cultural transformations that are taking place as media converge. He takes us into the secret world of Survivor Spoilers, where avid internet users pool their knowledge to unearth the shows secrets before they are revealed on the air. He introduces us to young Harry Potter fans who are writing their own Hogwarts tales while executives at Warner Brothers struggle for control of their franchise. He shows us how The Matrix has pushed transmedia storytelling to new levels, creating a fictional world where consumers track down bits of the story across multiple media channels.Jenkins argues that struggles over convergence will redefine the face of American popular culture. Industry leaders see opportunities to direct content across many channels to increase revenue and broaden markets. At the same time, consumers envision a liberated public sphere, free of network controls, in a decentralized media environment. Sometimes corporate and grassroots efforts reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes these two forces are at war.
Jenkins provides a riveting introduction to the world where every story gets told and every brand gets sold across multiple media platforms. He explains the cultural shift that is occurring as consumers fight for control across disparate channels, changing the way we do business, elect our leaders, and educate our children.
[via]More editions of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems'
Reflects on the changes the Internet has stimulated for art curation and examines the work of the curator in relation to a wider socio-political context. Articulated through two key issues, immateriality and network systems, this book considers how the practice of curating has been transformed by distributed networks beyond the rhetoric of free software and open systems. Because the site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet, the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems, multiple agents and software. This upgraded "operating system? of art presents new possibilities of online curating that is collective and distributed "even a self-organizing system that curates itself. The curator is part of this entire system but not central to it. The third book in the DATA Browser series of critical texts that explore issues at the intersection of culture and technology. [via]
More editions of Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cybercultures Reader'
The Cybercultures Reader brings together key writings covering the whole spectrum of cyberspace and related new technologies to explore the ways in which new technologies are reshaping cultural forms and practices at the turn of the century. The reader is divided into thematic sections focussing on key issues such as subcultures in cyberspace, posthumanism and cyberbodies, and pop-cultural depictions of human-machine interaction. Key features include: each section features an introduction locating the essays in their theoretical and technological context; editor's introduction and accompanying user's guide; extensive bibliography Issues include: theoretical approaches to cyberculture; representations in fiction and on film; the development of distinct cyber-subcultures; feminist and queer approaches within cyberculture. Anne Balsamo, Michael Benedikt, Gareth Branwyn, Scott Bukatman, Lisa Cartwright, Susan Clerc, David B Downing, Arturo Escobar, Mike Featherstone, Jennifer Gonzalez, Donna Haraway, Alison Landsberg, [via]
More editions of The Cybercultures Reader:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature'
More editions of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Is Changing Our Lives'
From the advent of electronic communications, there's been talk about how the world has been shrinking. Frances Cairncross, senior editor for the Economist, makes her case from an economical standpoint: The growing ease and speed of communication is creating a world where the miles have little to do with our ability to work or interact together. Cairncross predicts that it won't be long before people organize globally on the basis of language and three basic time shifts--one for the Americas, one for Europe, and one for East Asia and Australia. Much work that can be done on a computer can be done from anywhere. Workers can code software in one part of the world and pass it to a company hundreds of miles away that will assemble the code for marketing. And with workers able to earn a living from anywhere, countries may find themselves competing for citizens as people relocate for reasons ranging from lower taxes to nicer weather. Cairncross discusses about 30 major changes likely to result from these trends, including greater self-policing of businesses, an unavoidable loss of personal privacy, and a diminishing need for countries to want emigration. [via]
More editions of The Death of Distance: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Digital Art'
More editions of Digital Art:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy'
More editions of Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media'
By definition, the notion of the dialectic--that powerful philosophical tool for understanding the constant ebb and flow of argument, history, and reality itself--is hard to pin down. And so is The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, a smart collection of mostly academic essays, which aims to identify a dialectic at the heart of the digital technologies currently reshaping the way we see and know the world. Just what that dialectic might be varies from contributor to contributor--as does the quality of the essays, which originated as presentations at a 1995 conference--but Lunenfeld's elegant running commentary does a nice job of teasing out their common concerns.
Grouped in sections with headings like "The Real and the Ideal," "The Body and the Machine," and "The Medium and the Message," such sharp-eyed commentators as philosopher Michael Heim, literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, and new-media auteur Florian Brody grapple with the complicated give and take implied in those opposing terms. They use it to elucidate the pros and cons of cybernetics, Net porn, Neo-Luddism, hypertext, and a host of other ripe cybercultural phenomena. The parts of this book don't necessarily add up to a coherent sum, but their shared commitment to living with the dialectic--i.e., to eschewing the one-sidedness of both utopian and dystopian visions of the digital--sets an invaluable tone. --Julian Dibbell [via]
More editions of The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Electronic Culture: Technology & Visual Representation.'
More editions of Electronic Culture: Technology & Visual Representation.:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation'
The technology of representation and imaging has undergone vast changes. Imaging technologies can now create representations of high-tech warfare, manifest virtual reality, or visualize an atom. This series of essays by philosophers, media theorists, and cultural critics carefully examines these advances and grants special attention to the digital explosion of the 90s. Essays cover everything from the limits of photographic representation in the time of digital imaging to a filmmaker's thoughts on immersive environments. This is not light reading and many essays have an academic tone, but it's an important work for those interested in new media and technologies. [via]
More editions of Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age'
More editions of The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Envisioning Information'
This book celebrates escapes from the flatlands of both paper and computer screen, showing superb displays of high-dimensional complex data. The most design-oriented of Edward Tufte's books, Envisioning Information shows maps, charts, scientific presentations, diagrams, computer interfaces, statistical graphics and tables, stereo photographs, guidebooks, courtroom exhibits, timetables, use of color, a pop-up, and many other wonderful displays of information. The book provides practical advice about how to explain complex material by visual means, with extraordinary examples to illustrate the fundamental principles of information displays. Topics include escaping flatland, color and information, micro/macro designs, layering and separation, small multiples, and narratives. Winner of 17 awards for design and content. 400 illustrations with exquisite 6- to 12-color printing throughout. Highest quality design and production. [via]
More editions of Envisioning Information:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Essential Mcluhan'
Given the profound influence that the writings and teachings of Marshall McLuhan have had in the Information Age, it is surprising how few people have read anything more than context-free excerpts printed in indecipherable day-glo fonts over a background guaranteed to induce vertigo. But once you actually get around to reading McLuhan's ideas about the Global Village, the history of print, and the rise of digital media, you realize that behind the hype he did indeed make many substantive and influential contributions.
Surprisingly, most of McLuhan's seminal books are still out of print (as of 1996). Luckily, this collection of articles and excerpts from his most important books is a comprehensive and accessible overview of the musings of the "Patron Saint of the Digerati". It includes substantial passages from my favorite McLuhan book The Gutenberg Galaxy (a brilliantly provocative academic treatise about the history and consequences of writing and printing), as well as many articles and interviews you wouldn't find in any of his previously published books anyway.
The main weaknesses of this volume are that it does not include excerpts from the hyper-kinetic and image-packed "The Medium is the Massage" -- his main contribution to pop culture of the late '60s -- and that the sources of each passage are noted only in an appendix. It would have been nice if sources were noted at the beginning or end of each linear text, and I hope this is addressed in future editions. Other than these minor editorial quibbles, this book is highly recommended. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter'
In his fourth book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, iconoclastic science writer Steven Johnson (who used himself as a test subject for the latest neurological technology in his last book, Mind Wide Open) takes on one of the most widely held preconceptions of the postmodern world--the belief that video games, television shows, and other forms of popular entertainment are detrimental to Americans' cognitive and moral development. Everything Good builds a case to the contrary that is engaging, thorough, and ultimately convincing.
The heart of Johnson's argument is something called the Sleeper Curve--a universe of popular entertainment that trends, intellectually speaking, ever upward, so that today's pop-culture consumer has to do more "cognitive work"--making snap decisions and coming up with long-term strategies in role-playing video games, for example, or mastering new virtual environments on the Internet-- than ever before. Johnson makes a compelling case that even today's least nutritional TV junk foodthe Joe Millionaires and Survivors so commonly derided as evidence of America's cultural decline--is more complex and stimulating, in terms of plot complexity and the amount of external information viewers need to understand them, than the Love Boats and I Love Lucys that preceded it. When it comes to television, even (perhaps especially) crappy television, Johnson argues, "the content is less interesting than the cognitive work the show elicits from your mind."
Johnson's work has been controversial, as befits a writer willing to challenge wisdom so conventional it has ossified into accepted truth. But even the most skeptical readers should be captivated by the intriguing questions Johnson raises, whether or not they choose to accept his answers. --Erica C. Barnett [via]
More editions of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Pop Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age'
More editions of Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture'
More editions of Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Far from the Madding Gerund: And Other Dispatches from Language Log'
Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum have collected some of their most insightful and amusing material from Language Log, their popular web site. Often irreverent and hilarious, these brief essays take on many sacred cows, showing us--among many things--why Strunk & White is useless, how the College Board can't identify sentence errors in the SAT, and what makes Dan Brown one of the worst prose stylists in the business.
There is plenty here to inspire deeper thoughts as well. Why do Pete Rose's statements fall short of saying "I'm sorry," and can we learn how to apologize by analyzing his mistakes? Is there such a thing as mind-reading fatigue? What is the meaning of "pluralism" and "Yankeehood"?
Language Log is a site where serious professional linguists go to have fun. There's plenty of fun and plenty to get you thinking about language in new ways in this collection. [via]
More editions of Far from the Madding Gerund: And Other Dispatches from Language Log:
› Find signed collectible books: 'First Person: New Media As Story, Performance, And Game'
Electronic games have established a huge international market, significantly outselling non-digital games; people spend more money on The Sims than on "Monopoly" or even on "Magic: the Gathering." Yet it is widely believed that the market for electronic literature -- predicted by some to be the future of the written word -- languishes. Even bestselling author Stephen King achieved disappointing results with his online publication of "Riding the Bullet" and "The Plant."Isn't it possible, though, that many hugely successful computer games -- those that depend on or at least utilize storytelling conventions of narrative, character, and theme -- can be seen as examples of electronic literature? And isn't it likely that the truly significant new forms of electronic literature will prove to be (like games) so deeply interactive and procedural that it would be impossible to present them as paper-like "e-books"? The editors of First Person have gathered a remarkably diverse group of new media theorists and practitioners to consider the relationship between "story" and "game," as well as the new kinds of artistic creation (literary, performative, playful) that have become possible in the digital environment.This landmark collection is organized as a series of discussions among creators and theorists; each section includes three presentations, with each presentation followed by two responses. Topics considered range from "Cyberdrama" to "Ludology" (the study of games), to "The Pixel/The Line" to "Beyond Chat." The conversational structure inspired contributors to revise, update, and expand their presentations as they prepared them for the book, and the panel discussions have overflowed into a First Person web site (created in conjunction with the online journal Electronic Book Review).
[via]More editions of First Person: New Media As Story, Performance, and Game:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture'
Contributors. Anne Balsamo, Gareth Branwyn, Scott Bukatman, Pat Cadigan, Gary Chapman, Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, Mark Dery, Julian Dibbell, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Pauline, Peter Schwenger, Vivian Sobchack, Claudia Springer
More editions of Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition'
In an insightful assessment of the study and teaching of writing against the larger theoretical, political, and technological upheavals of the past thirty years, Fragments of Rationality questions why composition studies has been less affected by postmodern theory than other humanities and social science disciplines.
More editions of Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition:

› Find signed collectible books: 'From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War And Video Games'
More editions of From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War And Video Games:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen'
More editions of Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Graffito'
More editions of Graffito:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace'
More editions of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hamlet on the Holodeck : The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace'
Technology changes storytelling--movies don't tell stories in the same manner as wandering bards. Janet H. Murray, director of the Laboratory for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is fascinated with the changes emerging technologies may bring. Interactive tales, more versatile structures, stories as games, and games as stories are among the topics she explores in her very personable and entertaining style. And what about fears that interactive escapism could be the coming addiction? She makes an unblinking examination of this question with insight into both the technological possibilities and the strengths of the human psyche. Strongly recommended for anyone who loves the art of storytelling in any medium. [via]
More editions of Hamlet on the Holodeck : The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Handbook of New Media'
More editions of Handbook of New Media:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping And Social Consequences Of ICTs Updated Student Edition'
More editions of Handbook of New Media: Social Shaping And Social Consequences Of ICTs Updated Student Edition:
› Find signed collectible books: 'How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics'
The title of this scholarly yet remarkably accessible slice of contemporary cultural history has a whiff of paradox about it: what can it mean, exactly, to say that we humans have become something other than human? The answer, Katherine Hayles explains, lies not in ourselves but in our tools. Ever since the invention of electronic computers five decades ago, these powerful new machines have inspired a shift in how we define ourselves both as individuals and as a species.
Hayles tracks this shift across the history of avant-garde computer theory, starting with Norbert Weiner and other early "cyberneticists," who were the first to systematically explore the similarities between living and computing systems. Hayles's study ends with artificial-life specialists, many of whom no longer even bother to distinguish between life forms and computers. Along the way she shows these thinkers struggling to reconcile their traditional, Western notions of human identity with the unsettling, cyborg directions in which their own work seems to be leading humanity.
This is more than just the story of a geek elite, however. Hayles looks at cybernetically inspired science fiction by the likes of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Neal Stephenson to show how the larger culture grapples with the same issues that dog the technologists. She also draws lucidly on her own broad grasp of contemporary philosophy both to contextualize those issues and to contend with them herself. The result is a fascinating introduction--and a valuable addition--to one of the most important currents in recent intellectual history. --Julian Dibbell [via]
More editions of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics:
![[???]: If/Then: Design Implications of New Media [???]: If/Then: Design Implications of New Media](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/9072007522.01._SL160_SCLZZZZZZZ__.jpg)
More editions of If/Then: Design Implications of New Media:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Information Please: Culture And Politics in the Age of Digital Machines'
More editions of Information Please: Culture And Politics in the Age of Digital Machines:

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Information Subject'
More editions of The Information Subject:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Internet Art'
Internet Art (World of Art) [Paperback] by Rachel Greene [via]
More editions of Internet Art:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce'
More editions of Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Jeffrey Shaw--A User's Manual/Jeffrey Shaw--Eine Gebrauchsanweisung: From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality/Vom Expanded Cinema Zur Virtuellen Realitat'
More editions of Jeffrey Shaw--A User's Manual/Jeffrey Shaw--Eine Gebrauchsanweisung: From Expanded Cinema to Virtual Reality/Vom Expanded Cinema Zur Virtuellen Realitat:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Kenneth Anger: A Demonic Visionary'
More editions of Kenneth Anger: A Demonic Visionary:
› Find signed collectible books: 'LA Chambre Claire'
Suite de petits essais de Roland Barthes sur la photographie. [via]
More editions of LA Chambre Claire:
› Find signed collectible books: 'La economia Long Tail/ The Long Tail: De Los Mercados De Masas Al Triunfo De Lo Minoritario/ Why The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More'
What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone?
"The Long Tail" is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google.
However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know.
The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.
[via]More editions of La economia Long Tail/ The Long Tail: De Los Mercados De Masas Al Triunfo De Lo Minoritario/ Why The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Language of New Media'
In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database.Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media.
[via]More editions of The Language of New Media:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet'
May well be the first ethnographic study of the "computer world"...She has assembled a wealth of fascinating observations ... has conducted a far more thorough investigation than had been carried out before, and has written about her conclusions in a clear and lively way. --Howard Gardner, The New York Times Book Review [via]
More editions of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More'
What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone?
"The Long Tail" is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google.
However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know.
The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.
[via]More editions of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands'
Sellout "Brand" or just plain "Bland"? In Lovemarks, advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts delves deep into what mysteries lie behind the long-term success and unwavering customer loyalty for a can of Coke or a pair of Levi's, ultimately concluding that Love is the answer, and without some emotional connection to a product, it will dry up like a generic raisin in the sun. Enter Lovemarks, the new marketing buzzword, which will likely be bandied about at board meetings as vigorously as The Tipping Point.
But before Roberts can get to what in fact a Lovemark means in the worlds of advertising and marketing, he takes us on a virtual tour of his CV. There was his first post at Mary Quant in London, then the gig as New Products Manager of Gillette International in the Middle East, on to CEO of Pepsi in Canada, and later the same role at Lion Nathan in New Zealand. The list goes on, and so does Roberts--on and on--about his achievements and experience building brand awareness and shaking things up (he famously machine-gunned a vending machine at a presentation for a spot on the evening news). More importantly, he succeeds at blasting away the smoke and mirrors that might prevent a creative genius (or an ordinary consumer) from seeing what makes Superman the most beloved super-hero of all time.
Despite the somewhat egocentric approach to taking us there (he is, after-all, a pretty smart guy), we arrive at Roberts's point beautifully, and see what he sees: "That human attention has become our principle currency." And that, in these times, forming long-term emotionally charged relationships with customers is the only way to make a product weather the long haul. And while Roberts speaks to us in a spirited, conversational manner (that makes Lovemarks a pleasure to read), the design of the book seems to work against him, as convoluted typography and a general lack of layout consistency give the book a visually amateurish look. --Christene Barberich [via]
More editions of Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Making Art of Databases'
More editions of Making Art of Databases:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Media And Cultural Studies: Key Works'
More editions of Media And Cultural Studies: Key Works:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture'
Graphic Design shapes the meaning and impact of all we see and read. Mixing Messages traces how both the aesthetic value and overall pervasiveness of graphic design have changed over the past fifteen years. In this period, technological innovation and, especially, the rise of the personal computer have drastically altered graphic design practice, triggering explosions of creativity in all forms of visual communication. From the independent producer operating out of the home to the publishing conglomerate, a more diverse design community is creating the images that affect us every day.
From the printed page to the Internet, typefaces, colors, logos, and images transmit information and ideas, generating a literacy of the eye that affects us every day. In this important new book, a critical text accompanied by over 300 color illustrations explores the aesthetic, cultural, and technological issues that are shaping the future of graphic design. Featured is work by numerous designers, including Charles S. Anderson, Fabien Baron, Art Chantry, Stephen Doyle, Edward Fella, Tobias Frere-Jones, Dan Friedman, April Greiman, Jonathan Hoefler, Tibor Kalman, Zuzana Licko, Katherine McCoy, Paula Scher, and such global design offices as Landor Associates, Lippincott & Margulies, and Siegel & Gale. From this diverse array of practices, Mixing Messages constructs a rich picture of graphic design today. [via]
More editions of Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture:
› Find signed collectible books: 'New Digital Cinema: Reinventing The Moving Image'
More editions of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing The Moving Image:

› Find signed collectible books: 'New Media Art'
More editions of New Media Art:

› Find signed collectible books: 'New Media Careers for Artists and Designers'
More editions of New Media Careers for Artists and Designers:
› Find signed collectible books: 'New Media in Late 20Th-Century Art'
Twentieth-century art has often been characterized as a sweeping break from the tradition of painting. All the major art movements, from Cubism and Dada to Performance and Installation, were initiated as reactions to the centuries-old tradition of representing the world visually in recognizable ways. New definitions of art and the countless ways in which art can be made and experienced now place the artist firmly at the center of the artistic enterprise. This intelligent survey traces the history of new media in art and includes discussions of video art, digital art, and media and performance by artists such as Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramowic, Pipilotti Rist, and Bill Viola. Initiated by advances and inventions outside the world of art, technology-based art (which encompasses a wide range of practices from photography to film to video to virtual reality) has directed artists into areas once dominated by engineers and technicians. [via]
More editions of New Media in Late 20Th-Century Art:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization'
Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating the computer as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same kind of cultural and literary analysis as any natural language; computer languages have their own syntax, grammar, communities, and cultures. Instead of relying on established theoretical approaches, Galloway finds a new way to write about digital media, drawing on his backgrounds in computer programming and critical theory. "Discipline-hopping is a necessity when it comes to complicated socio-technical topics like protocol," he writes in the preface.Galloway begins by examining the types of protocols that exist, including TCP/IP, DNS, and HTML. He then looks at examples of resistance and subversion -- hackers, viruses, cyberfeminism, Internet art -- which he views as emblematic of the larger transformations now taking place within digital culture. Written for a nontechnical audience, Protocol serves as a necessary counterpoint to the wildly utopian visions of the Net that were so widespread in earlier days.
[via]More editions of Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Remediation: Understanding New Media'
Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They call this process of refashioning "remediation," and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.
[via]More editions of Remediation: Understanding New Media:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture'
Designer and critic Jessica Helfand has emerged as a leading voice of a new generation of designers. Her essays--at once pithy, polemical, and precise--appear in places as diverse as Eye, Print, ID, The New Republic, and the LA Times.The essays collected here decode the technologies, trends, themes, and personalities that define design today, especially "the new media," and provide a road map of things to come. Her first two chapbooks--Paul Rand: American Modernist and Six (+2) Essays on Design and New Media--became instant classics. This new compilation brings together essays from the earlier publications along with more than twenty others on a variety of topics including avatars, "the cult of the scratchy," television, sex on the screen, and more.Designers, students, educators, visual literati, and everyone looking for an entertaining and insightful guide to the world of design today will not find a better or more approachable book on the subject. [via]
More editions of Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age'
What's up, doc? Information scientist David M Levy wants us to look at the documents that fill our lives, and his book Scrolling Forward is a thoughtful reflection on their near-omnipresence. Levy has the perfect resumé for this job--after getting his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981, he moved to England to pursue the study of calligraphy and bookbinding. His love of books shows in his writing, which is rich with references and anecdotes from Walt Whitman to Woody Allen.
Drawing on examples as disparate as grocery store receipts, greeting cards, identity papers and (of course) e-mail, Levy finds the common threads binding them together and explores how and why we use them in daily life. He looks at digitisation closely, considering how speed, ease of editing, and potentially perfect copying changes our traditional considerations of documentation. Though he insists that he's looking at the present, not speculating about the future, it's hard to see how to avoid looking ahead after reading Scrolling Forward. --Rob Lightner [via]
More editions of Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Sisomo: The Future on Screen'
More editions of Sisomo: The Future on Screen:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Small Is the New Big: And 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas'
As one of today's most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world. Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog-ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years. A sample: Bon Jovi And The Pirates Christmas Card Spam Clinging To Your Job Title? How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah's Show? The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas The Seduction of "Good Enough" What Happens When It's All on Tape? Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert? Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction: "I guarantee that you'll find some ideas that don't work for you. But I'm certain that you're smart enough to see the stuff you've always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I'm betting that once inspired, you'll actually make something happen." [via]
More editions of Small Is the New Big: And 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web'
David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined does not merely celebrate the World Wide Web; it attempts to make a case that the institution has completely remodeled many of the world's self-perceptions. The book does so entertainingly, if not convincingly, and is a lively collection of epigrammatic phrases (the Web is "'place-ial' but not spatial"; "on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people"), as well as illustrations of these changes. There are intriguing assertions: that the Web is "broken on purpose" and that its many pockets of erroneous information and its available forums for disputing, say, manufacturers' hyperbole, let people feel more comfortable with their own inherent imperfections. At other times the book seems stale: it declares that the Web has disrupted long-held axioms about time, space, and knowledge retrieval and that it has dramatically rearranged notions of community and individuality. Weinberger's analysis, though occasionally facile and too relentlessly optimistic and overstated, is surely destined to be the subject of furious debate in chat rooms the cyber-world over. --H. O'Billovich [via]
More editions of Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition'
With historical, critical, and speculative essays by some of the leading television and media scholars, Television after TV examines both commercial and public service traditions and evaluates their dual (and some say merging) fates in our global, digital culture of convergence. The essays explore a broad range of topics, including contemporary programming and advertising strategies, the use of television and the Internet among diasporic and minority populations, the innovations of new technologies like TiVo, the rise of program forms from reality tv to lifestyle programs, televisions changing role in public places and at home, the Internets use as a means of social activism, and televisions role in education and the arts. In dialogue with previous media theorists and historians, the contributors collectively rethink the goals of media scholarship, pointing toward new ways of accounting for televisions past, present, and future.
Contributors
William Boddy
Charlotte Brunsdon
John T. Caldwell
Michael Curtin
Julie DAcci
Anna Everett
Jostein Gripsrud
John Hartley
Anna McCarthy
David Morley
Jan Olsson
Priscilla Peña Ovalle
Lisa Parks
Jeffrey Sconce
Lynn Spigel
William Uricchio
More editions of Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition:
› Find signed collectible books: 'This Is Modern Art'
Matthew Collings has already established a reputation for himself as one of the most irreverent and original commentators on the contemporary art world, with his books Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop and It Hurts: New York Art from Warhol to Now. With the publication of This is Modern Art, Collings has ordered an even bigger canvas to sketch his own uniquely original version of contemporary art today, which he sees as both increasingly popular but also at different points "glamorous, mysterious, sexy, soulful, macabre, gloomy, quirky, kinky and funny". Written to accompany the television series of the same name, This is Modern Art is an in-your-face guide to modern art from Goya's "Disasters of War" to Gillian Wearing's prize-winning video of the police. Along the way, Collings addresses the questions which have both defined and plagued perplexed responses to modern art, including its desire to shock, its questionable aesthetic value, its humour and its blankness. As it moves along in a style which is at times infuriating but always direct and funny, This is Modern Art points out how far we've come since Picasso and Matisse, reverses out of the cul-de-sac of postmodernism, waves the flag for New British Artists like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, and ultimately leaves his audience with a streetwise, upbeat book on the abiding value of modern art. --Jerry Brotton [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man'
Though he was once proclaimed "the oracle of the electronic age," perhaps the world was not quite ready for Marshall McLuhan when he came to prominence in the 1960s. With the advent of digital technology, the Internet, and the global economy, however, there can be little doubt that he is relevant now. Understanding Media is one of McLuhan's most popular books, offering some of his more pungent and provocative insights on our need to adapt from a relatively slow, fragmented mechanical age to a high-speed, highly integrated electronic one. McLuhan's formidable intelligence and imagination make it both enlightening and fun to read. Northrop Frye, McLuhan's colleague at the University of Toronto, once identified "the use of paradox and the pretence of naïveté" as the two primary tactics of teaching. From his own bag of tricks McLuhan adds obscurity ("Our world has become compressional by dramatic reversal"); hyperbole ("We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time"); tautology ("TV is environmental and imperceptible, like all environments"); and the occasional dash of absurdist whimsy ("As extension of man the chair is a specialist ablation of the posterior, a sort of ablative absolute of backside, whereas the couch extends the integral being"). McLuhan also has a flare for the catchy phrase, and in Understanding Media the reader will find his famous dictum "the medium is the message" as well as the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media discussed at length.
After setting forth a few general principles, Understanding Media conjures a fly's-eye view of late-20th-century culture, with short sections on writing, speech, comics, telephones, television, money, movies, weapons, and much more. And while the discussion is rippling with uncanny, sometimes visionary, insight, its author remains an earnest humanist at heart. "The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness," McLuhan says, "is a natural adjunct of electronic technology.& There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude." --Russell Prather [via]
More editions of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Critical Edition'
When Marshall McLuhan first coined the phrases "global village" and "the medium is the message" in 1964, no-one could have predicted today's information-dependent planet. No-one, that is, except for a handful of science fiction writers and Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media was written twenty years before the PC revolution and thirty years before the rise of the Internet. Yet McLuhan's insights into our engagement with a variety of media led to a complete rethinking of our entire society. He believed that the message of electronic media foretold the end of humanity as it was known. In 1964, this looked like the paranoid babblings of a madman. In our twenty-first century digital world, the madman looks quite sane. Understanding Media: the most important book ever written on communication. Ignore its message at your peril. [via]
More editions of Understanding Media; The Extension of Man:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Visual Aesthetics'
More editions of Visual Aesthetics:

› Find signed collectible books: 'We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For the People'
Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. Not content to accept the news as reported, these readers-turned-reporters are publishing in real time to a worldwide audience via the Internet. The impact of their work is just beginning to be felt by professional journalists and the newsmakers they cover. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.
We the Media is essential reading for all participants in the news cycle:
Journalism in the 21st century will be fundamentally different from the Big Media that prevails today. We the Media casts light on the future of journalism, and invites us all to be part of it.
More editions of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By The People, For the People:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition'
More editions of Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Writing Machines'
Tracing a journey from the 1950s through the 1990s, N. Katherine Hayles uses the autobiographical persona of Kaye to explore how literature has transformed itself from inscriptions rendered as the flat durable marks of print to the dynamic images of CRT screens, from verbal texts to the diverse sensory modalities of multimedia works, from books to technotexts.Weaving together Kaye's pseudo-autobiographical narrative with a theorization of contemporary literature in media-specific terms, Hayles examines the ways in which literary texts in every genre and period mutate as they are reconceived and rewritten for electronic formats. As electronic documents become more pervasive, print appears not as the sea in which we swim, transparent because we are so accustomed to its conventions, but rather as a medium with its own assumptions, specificities, and inscription practices. Hayles explores works that focus on the very inscription technologies that produce them, examining three writing machines in depth: Talan Memmott's groundbreaking electronic work Lexia to Perplexia, Mark Z. Danielewski's cult postprint novel House of Leaves, and Tom Phillips's artist's book A Humument. Hayles concludes by speculating on how technotexts affect the development of contemporary subjectivity.Writing Machines is the second volume in the Mediawork Pamphlets series.
[via]More editions of Writing Machines:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Maquina E Imaginario: O Desafio Das Poeticas Tecnologicas'
More editions of Maquina E Imaginario: O Desafio Das Poeticas Tecnologicas:

› Find signed collectible books: 'Lettres Et Techne: Informatique, Instrumentations, Methodes Et Theories Dans Le Domaine Litteraire'
More editions of Lettres Et Techne: Informatique, Instrumentations, Methodes Et Theories Dans Le Domaine Litteraire:
› Find signed collectible books: 'La economia Long Tail/ The Long Tail: De Los Mercados De Masas Al Triunfo De Lo Minoritario/ Why The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More'
More editions of La economia Long Tail/ The Long Tail: De Los Mercados De Masas Al Triunfo De Lo Minoritario/ Why The Future of Business Is Selling Less of More:
