Balkan Cyberia

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Balkan Cyberia

Author : Victor Petrov
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262545128
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Balkan Cyberia by : Victor Petrov

Download or read book Balkan Cyberia written by Victor Petrov and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Bulgaria transformed the computer industry behind the Iron Curtain—and the consequences of that transformation for a society that dreamt of a brighter future. Bulgaria in 1963 was a communist country led by a centralized party trying to navigate a multinational Cold War. The state needed money, and it sought prestige. By cultivating a burgeoning computer industry, Bulgaria achieved both but at great cost to the established order. In Balkan Cyberia, Victor Petrov elevates a deeply researched, local story of ambition into an essential history of global innovation, ideological conflict, and exchange. Granted tremendous freedom by the Politburo and backed by a concerted state secret intelligence effort, a new, privileged class of technical intellectuals and managers rose to prominence in Bulgaria in the 1960s. Plugged in to transnational business and professional networks, they strove to realize the party’s radical dreams of utopian automation, and Bulgaria would come to manufacture up to half of the Eastern Bloc’s electronics. Yet, as Petrov shows, the export-oriented nature of the industry also led to the disruption of party rule. Technicians, now thinking with and through computers, began to recast the dominant intellectual discourse within a framework of reform, while technocratic managers translated their newfound political clout into economic power that served them well before and after the revolutions of 1989. Balkan Cyberia reveals the extension of economic and political networks of influence far past the reputed fall of communism, along with the pivotal role small countries played in geopolitical games at the time. Through the prism of the Bulgarian computer industry, the true nature of the socialist international economy, and indeed the links between capitalism and communism, emerge.

Balkan Cyberia

Author : Victor Petrov
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262373254
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (623 download)

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Book Synopsis Balkan Cyberia by : Victor Petrov

Visions of a Digital Nation

Author : Jacob Ward
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262546299
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Visions of a Digital Nation by : Jacob Ward

Download or read book Visions of a Digital Nation written by Jacob Ward and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why the privatization of British Telecom signaled a pivotal moment in the rise of neoliberalism, and how it was shaped by the longer development and digitalization of Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure. When Margaret Thatcher sold British Telecom for £3.6 billion in 1984, it became not only, at the time, the largest stock flotation in history, but also a watershed moment in the rise of neoliberalism and deregulation. In Visions of a Digital Nation, Jacob Ward offers an incisive interdisciplinary perspective on how technology prefigured this pivot. Giving due consideration to the politicians, engineers, and managers who paved the way for this historic moment, Ward illustrates how the decision validated the privatization of public utilities and tied digital technology to free market rationales. In this examination of the national and, at times, global history of technology, Ward’s approach is sweeping. Utilizing infrastructure studies, environmental history, and urban and local history, Ward explores Britain’s nationalist and welfarist plans for a digital information utility and shows how these projects contested and adapted to the “market turn” under Margaret Thatcher. Ultimately, Visions of a Digital Nation compellingly argues that politicians did not impose neoliberalism top-down, but that technology, engineers, and managers shaped these politics from the bottom up.

Your Computer Is on Fire

Author : Thomas S. Mullaney
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026253973X
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Your Computer Is on Fire by : Thomas S. Mullaney

Download or read book Your Computer Is on Fire written by Thomas S. Mullaney and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology scholars declare an emergency: attention must be paid to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: we can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism, or even techno-neutrality. We should not be reassured by such soothing generalities as "human error," "virtual reality," or "the cloud." We need to realize that nothing is virtual: everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first, and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL. In Your Computer Is on Fire, technology scholars train a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.

IBM

Author : James W. Cortada
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262547821
Total Pages : 747 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis IBM by : James W. Cortada

Download or read book IBM written by James W. Cortada and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of one of the most influential American companies of the last century. For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue, ” an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success, surviving flatlining revenue and forced reinvention. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative, monumental history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century. Cortada, a historian who worked at IBM for many years, describes IBM's technology breakthroughs, including the development of the punch card (used for automatic tabulation in the 1890 census), the calculation and printing of the first Social Security checks in the 1930s, the introduction of the PC to a mass audience in the 1980s, and the company's shift in focus from hardware to software. He discusses IBM's business culture and its orientation toward employees and customers; its global expansion; regulatory and legal issues, including antitrust litigation; and the track records of its CEOs. The secret to IBM's unequalled longevity in the information technology market, Cortada shows, is its capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and technologies.

Everyday Stalinism

Author : Victor Petrov
Publisher : Macat Library
ISBN 13 : 9781912302543
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (25 download)

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Book Synopsis Everyday Stalinism by : Victor Petrov

Download or read book Everyday Stalinism written by Victor Petrov and published by Macat Library. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sheila Fitzpatrick's Everyday Stalinism rejects the simplistic treatment of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian government that tightly controlled its citizens.

The Epic City

Author : Kushanava Choudhury
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 163557157X
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (355 download)

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Book Synopsis The Epic City by : Kushanava Choudhury

Download or read book The Epic City written by Kushanava Choudhury and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2018 Ondaatje Prize Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year A masterful and entirely fresh portrait of great hopes and dashed dreams in a mythical city from a major new literary voice. Everything that could possibly be wrong with a city was wrong with Calcutta. When Kushanava Choudhury arrived in New Jersey at the age of twelve, he had already migrated halfway around the world four times. After graduating from Princeton, he moved back to the world which his immigrant parents had abandoned, to a city built between a river and a swamp, where the moisture-drenched air swarms with mosquitos after sundown. Once the capital of the British Raj, and then India's industrial and cultural hub, by 2001 Calcutta was clearly past its prime. Why, his relatives beseeched him, had he returned? Surely, he could have moved to Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore, where a new Golden Age of consumption was being born. Yet fifteen million people still lived in Calcutta. Working for the Statesman, its leading English newspaper, Kushanava Choudhury found the streets of his childhood unchanged by time. Shouting hawkers still overran the footpaths, fish-sellers squatted on bazaar floors; politics still meant barricades and bus burnings, while Communist ministers travelled in motorcades. Sifting through the chaos for the stories that never make the papers, Kushanava Choudhury paints a soulful, compelling portrait of the everyday lives that make Calcutta. Written with humanity, wit and insight, The Epic City is an unforgettable depiction of an era, and a city which is a world unto itself.

The Government Machine

Author : Jon Agar
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262292904
Total Pages : 565 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (622 download)

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Book Synopsis The Government Machine by : Jon Agar

Download or read book The Government Machine written by Jon Agar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-09-26 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action—a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose "government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant. Over the course of two centuries, government has become the major repository and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study the state, and vice versa.

The Internet Imaginaire

Author : Patrice Flichy
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262562383
Total Pages : 263 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis The Internet Imaginaire by : Patrice Flichy

Download or read book The Internet Imaginaire written by Patrice Flichy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-09-26 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet: what led software designers, managers, employees, politicians, and individuals to develop and adopt one particular technology. In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet—the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical "information superhighway" became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another. Flichy draws on writings by experts—paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week—from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices; and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture—the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on "the virtual society imaginaire," discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial.

Positive Images

Author : Dion Kagan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1838608982
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (386 download)

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Book Synopsis Positive Images by : Dion Kagan

Download or read book Positive Images written by Dion Kagan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tidal wave of panic surrounded homosexuality and AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s, the period commonly called 'The AIDS Crisis'. With the advent of antiretroviral drugs in the mid '90s, however, the meaning of an HIV diagnosis radically changed. These game-changing drugs now enable many people living with HIV to lead a healthy, regular life, but how has this dramatic shift impacted the representation of gay men and HIV in popular culture? Positive Images is the first detailed examination of how the relationship between gay men and HIV has transformed in the past two decades. From Queer as Folk to Chemsex, The Line of Beauty to The Normal Heart, Dion Kagan examines literature, film, TV, documentaries and news coverage from across the English-speaking world to unearth the socio-cultural foundations underpinning this 'post-crisis' period. His analyses provide acute insights into the fraught legacies of the AIDS Crisis and its continued presence in the modern queer consciousness.

American Reverie

Author : Synnika Lofton
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780578703930
Total Pages : 84 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (39 download)

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Book Synopsis American Reverie by : Synnika Lofton

Download or read book American Reverie written by Synnika Lofton and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-04 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Like musicians trading solos, McGee and Lofton's voices vibrate with energy, building, jamming, pulsing across urban landscapes, imploring the spirit to stand up, wake up, and feel the trembling complexities of self and culture. This moving collection echoes Whitman and Hughes infused with the power and relevance of Zach De La Roche, poems standing boldly on the street corners of contemporary America." - Theodore Shank, author of Follow the Flickering Down

Exit from Hegemony

Author : Alexander Cooley
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0190916478
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis Exit from Hegemony by : Alexander Cooley

Download or read book Exit from Hegemony written by Alexander Cooley and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""We live in a period of uncertainty about the fate of American global leadership and the future of international order. The 2016 election of Donald Trump led many to pronounce the death, or at least terminal decline, of liberal international order - the system of institutions, rules, and values associated with the American-dominated international system. But the truth is that the unravelling of American global order began over a decade earlier. Exit from Hegemony develops an integrated approach to understanding the rise and decline of hegemonic orders. It calls attention to three drivers of transformation in contemporary order. First, great powers, most notably Russia and China, contest existing norms and values, while simultaneously building new spheres of international order through regional institutions. Second, the loss of the "patronage monopoly" once enjoyed by the United States and its allies allows weaker states to seek alternative providers of economic and military goods - providers who do not condition their support on compliance with liberal economic and political principles. Third, transnational counter-order movements, usually in the form of illiberal and right-wing nationalists, undermine support for liberal order and the American international system, including within the United States itself. Exit from Hegemony demonstrates that these broad sources of transformation - from above, below, and within - have transformed past international orders and undermine prior hegemonic powers. It provides evidence that that all three are, in the present, mutually reinforcing one another and, therefore, that the texture of world politics may be facing major changes""--

Home Computers

Author : Alex Wiltshire
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0262044013
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

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Book Synopsis Home Computers by : Alex Wiltshire

Download or read book Home Computers written by Alex Wiltshire and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of the early years of the digital revolution, when computing power was deployed in a beige box on your desk. Today, people carry powerful computers in our pockets and call them “phones.” A generation ago, people were amazed that the processing power of a mainframe computer could be contained in a beige box on a desk. This book is a celebration of those early home computers, with specially commissioned new photographs of 100 vintage computers and a generous selection of print advertising, product packaging, and instruction manuals. Readers can recapture the glory days of fondly remembered (or happily forgotten) machines including the Commodore 64, TRS-80, Apple Lisa, and Mattel Aquarius—traces of the techno-utopianism of the not-so-distant past. Home Computers showcases mass-market success stories, rarities, prototypes, one-offs, and never-before-seen specimens. The heart of the book is a series of artful photographs that capture idiosyncratic details of switches and plugs, early user-interface designs, logos, and labels. After a general scene-setting retrospective, the book proceeds computer by computer, with images of each device accompanied by a short history of the machine, its inventors, its innovations, and its influence. Readers who inhabit today's always-on, networked, inescapably connected world will be charmed by this visit to an era when the digital revolution could be powered down every evening.

Balkan Network

Author : Gregory M. Acuna
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 425 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (958 download)

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Book Synopsis Balkan Network by : Gregory M. Acuna

Download or read book Balkan Network written by Gregory M. Acuna and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intelligence operations during the Balkan's War uncovers key info about Serbia Army's defenses that could destroy the Allied Forces.

Happily and Madly

Author : Alexis Bass
Publisher : Tor Teen
ISBN 13 : 1250195926
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (51 download)

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Book Synopsis Happily and Madly by : Alexis Bass

Download or read book Happily and Madly written by Alexis Bass and published by Tor Teen. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexis Bass' Happily and Madly is a mature, twisty, compulsively readable YA suspense novel about a young girl who embraces a fate bound in love and mystery. Maris Brown has been told two things about her destiny: 1. She will fall happily and madly in love. 2. She could be dead before she turns eighteen. The summer before that fateful birthday, Maris is in the wealthy beach town of Cross Cove with her estranged father and his new family--and the infamous Duvals. Since the youngest member of the Duval family, Edison, is back from college and back in the arms of Maris’s new stepsister, her summer looks to be a long string of lazy days on the Duval's lush beach. But Edison is hiding something. And the more Maris learns about him, the more she’s given signs that she should stay as far away from him as possible. As wrong as it is, Maris is drawn to him. Around Edison, she feels truly alive and she's not willing to give that up. Even if it means a collision course with destiny. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Author : Yiyun Li
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 0399589112
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (995 download)

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Book Synopsis Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by : Yiyun Li

Download or read book Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life written by Yiyun Li and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her first memoir, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li offers a journey of recovery through literature: a letter from a writer to like-minded readers. “A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.”—Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead “What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?” Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, a mother, a daughter—and through it all she has been sustained by a profound connection with the writers and books she loves. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Søren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin, Dear Friend is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together. Interweaving personal experiences with a wide-ranging homage to her most cherished literary influences, Yiyun Li confronts the two most essential questions of her identity: Why write? And why live? Praise for Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life “Li has stared in the face of much that is beautiful and ugly and treacherous and illuminating—and from her experience she has produced a nourishing exploration of the will to live willfully.”—The Washington Post “Li’s transformation into a writer . . . is nothing short of astonishing.’”—The New York Times Book Review “An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.”—The Boston Globe “Li is an exemplary storyteller and this account of her journey back to equilibrium, assisted by her closest companion, literature, is as powerful as any of her award-winning fiction, with the dark fixture of her Beijing past at its centre.”—Financial Times “Every writer is a reader first, and Dear Friend is Li’s haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her. . . . Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound.”—Entertainment Weekly “Yiyun Li’s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original.”—San Francisco Chronicle

A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976

Author : Charles P. Bourne
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262261753
Total Pages : 522 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (617 download)

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Book Synopsis A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976 by : Charles P. Bourne

Download or read book A History of Online Information Services, 1963-1976 written by Charles P. Bourne and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed chronology of the early, pre-Internet years of online information systems and services. Every field of history has a basic need for a detailed chronology of what happened: who did what when. In the absence of such a resource, fanciful accounts flourish. This book provides a rich narrative of the early development of online information retrieval systems and services, from 1963 to 1976—a period important to anyone who uses a search engine, online catalog, or large database. Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and interviews with many of the key participants, the book describes the individuals, projects, and institutions of the period. It also corrects many common errors and misconceptions and provides milestones for many of the significant developments in online systems and technology.