Notices

Every issue of Postmodern Culture carries notices of events, calls for papers, and other announcements, free of charge. Advertisements will also be published on an exchange basis. If you respond to one of the ads or announcements below, please mention that you saw the notice in PMC.

Publication Announcements

Connected, or What It Means To Live in the Network Society
By Steven Shaviro
University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays--on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself.

Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us.

Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media
Edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick
MIT Press, 2003

The emergence of New Media has stimulated debate about the power of the visual to dethrone the cultural prominence of textuality and print. Some scholars celebrate the proliferation of digital images, arguing that it suggests a return to a pictorial age when knowledge was communicated through images as well as through words. Others argue that the inherent conflict between texts and images creates a battleground between the feminized, seductive power of images and the masculine rationality of the printed word. Eloquent Images suggests that these debates misunderstand the dynamic interplay that has always existed between word and image.

Arguing that the complex relationship between text and image in New Media does not represent a radical rupture from the past, the book examines rhetorical and cultural uses of word and image both historically and currently. It shows that complex, interpenetrating relationships between verbal and visual communication systems were already evident in hieroglyphic writing and in ancient rhetoric and persist in the work of classical rhetoricians, in cultural studies of technology, even in the binary code distinctions of digital environments. The essays blend theory, critique, and design practice to explore the often contradictory relations of word and image. All of them call for theoretically grounded approaches to hypermedia design.

Hypermedia Joyce Studies

Hypermedia Joyce Studies, the electronic journal of Joycean scholarship, announces the publication of Volume 4, Issue 1 (July 2003). Contributors include Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy, Louis Armand, Erik S. Roraback, Sheldon Brivic, and Petr Skrabanek. Visit <http://www.geocities.com/hypermedia_joyce/contents.html> to view the issue.

General Announcements

• Postcolonial Studies

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Postcolonialism and Digital Culture

Postcolonial studies is heavily affected by processes of globalization. Among these trends is the spread of networked computing and digital culture, from email and websites, from Usenet to massively multiple online games and digital art, from net news journals to blogs. Digital culture also affects the world labor market as workers around the globe are recruited into high technology jobs as diverse as assembly line production of computers, “homeworked” programming of software, and call centers where workers are taught the rudiments of foreign (mostly American) cultures to enable telephone support for products and services. New media, in short, are now global.

This special issue inquires into the consequences of such phenomena for the postcolonial condition.

Date for submissions: 1 September 2004

Please mark submissions for the attention of Mark Poster.

Submission guidelines can be found on the Web at <www.ipcs.org.au&gt...