Author: Paul Virilio File Type: pdf From Publishers WeeklyA prolific French intellectual known for his pronouncements on media, computers and technology, Virilio writes in the subversive tradition of Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Theodore Roszak. In this bracing collection of essays and articles, originally published in France in 1998, he emerges as a deeply skeptical critic of techno-culture, his blanket term encompassing cyberspace, Hollywood and pop culture, transgenic foodstuffs, animal cloning and the human genome project. Without much evidence, Virilio charges that the United States is waging an information war by using the Internet, the Web and global communications to foster cybernetic colonialism, a monopoly of knowledge abetting control over minds everywhere and over the politics of sovereign states. Far from history coming to an end, as Francis Fukuyama suggested, techno-progress, in Virilios diagnosis, is driving a new era of all-out globalization, spreading virtual realities, mass culture, biotechnology and weapons of mass destruction across the planet. This opens up possibilities for totalitarian control, social engineering and telesurveillance, he warns. Included are pieces on the space race, the suicidal Heavens Gate cybercult, the divorce of science from ethics, the controversial Sensation art exhibit and other topics Virilio astutely sets in the context of our modern age of pseudo-individualism and a liberal hedonism that is nothing more than every man for himself. While many of his prognoses are exaggerated and his academic prose can be tough sledding, Virilios cyber-skepticism is a refreshing antidote to the global village mantra of Net gurus. 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. ReviewOne of the most original thinkers of our time. (Liberation )Anyone who has ever secretly wished that Foucault would get to the point will relish the sudden hooks and jabs of revealed sense. (New York Times )Virilio makes his prose do somersaults through flaming conceptual hoops, inventing new words to explain ideas that would be difficult to reach if the trip werent so much fun. (Metro Santa Cruz )

Author: Michael Brown File Type: pdf When did medicine become modern? This book takes a fresh look at one of the most important questions in the history of medicine. It explores how the cultures, values and meanings of medicine were transformed across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as its practitioners came to submerge their local identities as urbane and learned gentlemen into the ideal of a nationwide and scientifically-based medical profession. Moving beyond traditional accounts of professionalization, it demonstrates how visions of what medicine was and might be were shaped by wider social and political forces, from the eighteenth-century values of civic gentility to the radical and socially progressive ideologies of the age of reform. Focusing on the provincial English city of York, it draws on a rich and wide-ranging archival record, including letters, diaries, newspapers and portraits, to reveal how these changes took place at the level of everyday practice, experience and representation. **