mit press apr 2017 (4 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware -A prominent German thinker argues thatcontrary to 'Twitter Revolution" cheerleadingdigital communication is destroying political discourse and political action.Libri GmbH, Europaallee 1, 36244 Bad Hersfeld 85 pp. Englisch.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - A prominent German thinker argues that contrary to Twitter Revolution cheerleading digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action.The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication. from In the SwarmDigital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. The shitstorm, writes Han, represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication. Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a multitude, but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a we, incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - An argument that love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other.Byung-Chul Han is one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, a member of the new generation of German thinkers that includes Markus Gabriel and Armen Avanessian. In The Agony of Eros, a bestseller in Germany, Han considers the threat to love and desire in today's society. For Han, love requires the courage to accept self-negation for the sake of discovering the Other. In a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated social interaction, it is the Other that is eradicated, not the self. In today's increasingly narcissistic society, we have come to look for love and desire within the inferno of the same. Han offers a survey of the threats to Eros, drawing on a wide range of sources Lars von Trier's film Melancholia, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, Fifty Shades of Grey, Michel Foucault (providing a scathing critique of Foucault's valorization of power), Martin Buber, Hegel, Baudrillard, Flaubert, Barthes, Plato, and others. Han considers the pornographication of society, and shows how pornography profanes eros; addresses capitalism's leveling of essential differences; and discusses the politics of eros in today's burnout society. To be dead to love, Han argues, is to be dead to thought itself. Concise in its expression but unsparing in its insight, The Agony of Eros is an important and provocative entry in Han's ongoing analysis of contemporary society.This remarkable essay, an intellectual experience of the first order, affords one of the best ways to gain full awareness of and join in one of the most pressing struggles of the day: the defense, that is to say as Rimbaud desired it the reinvention of love. from the foreword by Alain Badiou.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Why our human brains are awesome, and how we left our cousins, the great apes, behind: a tale of neurons and calories, and cooking.Humans are awesome. Our brains are gigantic, seven times larger than they should be for the size of our bodies. The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day. And it became enormous in a very short amount of time in evolution, allowing us to leave our cousins, the great apes, behind. So the human brain is special, right Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we are evolutionary outliers. The human brain was not singled out to become amazing in its own exclusive way, and it never stopped being a primate brain. If we are not an exception to the rules of evolution, then what is the source of the human advantage Herculano-Houzel shows that it is not the size of our brain that matters but the fact that we have more neurons in the cerebral cortex than any other animal, thanks to our ancestors' invention, some 1.5 million years ago, of a more efficient way to obtain calories: cooking. Because we are primates, ingesting more calories in less time made possible the rapid acquisition of a huge number of neurons in the still fairly small cerebral cortex the part of the brain responsible for finding patterns, reasoning, developing technology, and passing it on through culture.Herculano-Houzel shows us how she came to these conclusions making brain soup to determine the number of neurons in the brain, for example, and bringing animal brains in a suitcase through customs. The Human Advantage is an engaging and original look at how we became remarkable without ever being special.