What are cultural studies of science? While the term “cultural studies of science” designates a stream of research within the broader field of social studies of science, there is no clear consensus about what work is associated with this term…. Read More ›
Claude E. Shannon’s publication of A Mathematical Theory of Communication in the Bell System Technical Journal of July and October 1948 marks the beginning of information theory and can be considered “the Magna Carta of the information age” (Verdú 1998:… Read More ›
I What is life, and what makes human life unique? With the rise of the life sciences and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection in the nineteenth century, new answers to these questions were proposed that were deeply at… Read More ›
Despite a landmark essay by the novelist Robert Coover, the emergence of literary writing in new media does not signal an “end of books.” Conceivably, there could be an end to literary studies as an autonomous discipline and a cessation… Read More ›
Michel Serres (b.1930) was born in 1930 at Agen in France, son of a bargeman. In 1949, he went to naval college and subsequently, in 1952, to the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure (rue d’Ulm). In 1955, he obtained an agre´gation… Read More ›
Paul Virilio (b.1932) is the theorist of the effects of increasing speed in post or late-modernity. Of particular importance for him, in this regard, are information technology and technologies of vision, such as cinema and photography, especially in time of… Read More ›
Humberto Maturana (b.1928), a neurophysiologist from Chile, was a member of the second wave of cybernetics (1960–85) (Hayles 1999: 131), and has made a name for himself in developing a theory of autopoiesis, or the nature of reflexive feedback control… Read More ›
Donna Haraway (b.1944) has been concerned with deflating the uncritical acceptance of key oppositions, which have political implications, related to the domain of science, particularly to biology: human– animal, animal–machine, mind–body, male–female, fiction–reality, nature–culture, science–society. She is famous, above all,… Read More ›
A look at media at the beginning of the twenty-first century makes one thing certain: nothing is certain in terms of media boundaries and specificities. The cinema, for example, is a composite of elaborate sound and visual systems, enhanced by… Read More ›