Literature, Media, Information Systems: Information systems (Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture)

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.John Johnston's background combines expertise in modern literature, poststructuralist philosophy, and high technology's production. Like Kittler, he draws on historic fact, anecdote, and literature. From this vantage point he explicates the theoretical and practical consequences of Friedrich Kittler's insights into the social and psychological effects of the processes by which metaphor in one medium is made real by another. This volume introduces to an English-reading public the writings and insights of Friedrich A. Kittler, who - in the words of Robert C. Golub - is "the most imaginative and original of the German post-structuralists." The merging of the discourses of literature, of war, and of technology into a unified theme is Kittler's unique contribution to contemporary theory. The result of his research is a vision of the future in which the distinction between mediums is erased. If the technologies of the early twentieth century separated the flow of data, rendering the optical, the acoustic, and the written autonomous. Kittler views the digital as reuniting them. He theorizes that meanwhile we are living among "partially connected media systems." He has focused on the effects of the new information networks of computers, that have added the capacity of calculation to that of information storage. He suggests that it is our fate as human beings to be subjects of technology. Kittler, by focusing on the relationship between twentieth-century media, psychoanalysis, literature, war, and computer technology, follows Marshall McLuhan in his understanding of the effects of the media on our lives, and Paul Virilio in his understanding of the military origins of the new technologies. John Johnston's background combines expertise in modern literature, poststructuralist philosophy, and high technology's production. Like Kittler he draws on historic fact, anecdote, and literature. From this vantage point he explicates the theoretical and practical consequences of Friedrich Kittler's insights into the social and psychological effects of the processes by which metaphor in one medium is made realy by another. -- from back cover This volume introduces to an English-reading public the writings and insights of Friedrich A. Kittler, who, in the words of Robert C. Golub, is "the most imaginative and original of the German post-structuralists." Merging the discourses of literature, of war, and of technology into a unified theme is Kittler's unique contribution to contemporary theory. His research results in a vision of the future in which the distinction between mediums is erased. John Johnston's background combines expertise in modern literature, poststructuralist philosophy, and high technology's production. Like Kittler, he draws on historic fact, anecdote, and literature. From this vantage point he explicates the theoretical and practical consequences of Friedrich Kittler's insights into the social and psychological effects of the processes by which metaphor in one medium is made real by another.--Publisher description Gramophone, film, typewriter -- Dracula's legacy -- Romanticism - psychoanalysis - film : a history of the double -- Media and drugs in Pynchon's second world war -- Media wars : trenches, lightning, stars -- The world of the symbolic - a world of the machine -- There is no software -- Protected mode. This volume is a collection of public writings and insights of the German post-structuralist, Friedrich A. Kittler. It merges the discourse of literature, war and technology into a unified theme. His research results in a vision of the future in which the distinction between mediums is erased.