Notices: Publications 

Volume 14, Number 1
September, 2003 

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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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