Product Description: Can today's city govern well if its citizens lack modern technology? How important is access to computers for lowering unemployment? What infrastructure does a city have to build in order to attract new business?   In this new collection, Michael A...read more

This book develops a fresh perspective on everyday forms of engagement, one that foregrounds the role of objects, technologies and settings in democracy. Examining a range of devices, from smart meters to eco-homes, the book sets out new concepts and methods for analyzing the relations between participation, innovation and the environment.

A self-deprecating divorce lawyer with a yen for happy endings, D.T. Jones takes on as clients three women--Mareth Stone, Lucinda Flinders, and Esther Preston--each of whom has a seemingly hopeless case

Since the late 1950s, the idea that hidden, imperceptible messages could influence mass behavior has been debated, feared, and ridiculed. In Swift Viewing, Charles R. Acland reveals the secret story of subliminal influence, showing how an obscure concept from experimental psychology became a mainstream belief about our vulnerability to manipulation in an age of media clutter. He chronicles the enduring popularity of the dubious claims about subliminal influence, tracking their migration from nineteenth-century hypnotism to twentieth-century front-page news. His expansive history of popular concern about subliminal messages shows how the notion of “hidden persuaders” became a vernacular media critique, one reflecting anxiety about a rapidly expanding media environment. Through a deep archive of eclectic examples, including educational technology in the American classroom, mind-control tropes in science fiction, Marshall McLuhan’s media theories, and sensational claims in the late 1950s about subliminal advertising, Acland establishes the subliminal as both a product of and a balm for information overload.

Product Description: Virtual America traces the complex relationship between Americans, technology, and their environment as it has unfolded over the past several centuries. Throughout history Americans have constructed mental pictures of unique places, such as the American West, that have taken on more authority than the actual gritty landscapes...read more

Product Description: Foreword by Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and The Bill McKibben ReaderDo you text during family dinners or read e-mails during meetings? Does your spouse learn about your day from Facebook? Do you get news about the world by scanning online headlines while also doing something else? Welcome to the land of distraction...read more

Demonstrating how man's belief in growth has created a continuing succession of crises, Sale examines ways to scale down our institutions

Demonstrates how technology is more than gadgetry, exploring divergent views on technology, and drawing on literature and art to explain how technology can be built to work with ecological systems.

From 1900 to 1960, the introduction and development of four so-called urbanizing technologies–the telephone, automobile, radio, and electric light and power–transformed the rural United States. But did these new technologies revolutionize rural life in the ways modernizers predicted? And how exactly–and with what levels of resistance and acceptance–did this change take place? In Consumers in the Country Ronald R. Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and others who promoted these technologies and the farm families who largely succeeded in adapting them to rural culture.

Does technology alter our ways of being in and perceiving the world, or does it merely serve as a conduit for predetermined patterns of culture? In addressing this question, Popular Modernity in America examines a broad range of related cultural and technological phenomena from Bing Crosby to Ice Cube, from the invention of the telegraph to the celebratory heralding of the internet in the 1990s that have helped shape American popular culture over the past 150 years. Throughout, it avoids the binaries that label popular culture as inherently liberatory or subtly oppressive, arguing instead for the triadic relationship of experience, technology, and myth, each of which has an active role to play in how we interact with popular culture." (view table of contents)

The author shows how the socalled 'militaryindustrial complex' succeeded in revolutionizing aerospace, computers, and communications by changing how technology was used, understood, and managed in business, industry, and government. Reprint. (view table of contents)

As any American who has traveled abroad knows, the American home contains more, and more elaborate, plumbing than any other in the world. Indeed, Americans are renowned for their obsession with cleanliness. Although plumbing has occupied a central position in American life since the mid-nineteenth century, little scholarly attention has been paid to its history. Now, in All the Modern Conveniences, Maureen Ogle presents a fascinating study that explores the development of household plumbing in nineteenth-century America. Until 1840, indoor plumbing could be found only in mansions and first-class hotels. Then, in the decade before midcentury, Americans representing a wider range of economic circumstances began to install household plumbing with increasing eagerness. Ogle draws on a wide assortment of contemporary sources--sanitation reports, builders' manuals, fixture catalogues, patent applications, and popular scientific tracts--to show how the demand for plumbing was prompted more by an emerging middle-class culture of convenience, reform, and domestic life than by fears about poor hygiene and inadequate sanitation. She also examines advancements in water-supply and waste-management technology, the architectural considerations these amenities entailed, and the scientific approach to sanitation that began to emerge by century's end. "As part of this well-researched study, Maureen Ogle links cities, politicians, systems, sanitarians, and ideas to produce a compelling account of household plumbing--a taken-for-granted set of devices that allowed Americans to express their individualism and their commitment to 'science.'"--Mark H. Rose, Florida Atlantic University (view table of contents)

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Product Description: During the 20th century, the marketing of domestic appliances and office machines has been directed primarily toward women. Mechanical Brides examines this phenomenon through extensive graphics (advertisements, catalog pages, photographs) and analytical text. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)