Cultures of Obsolescence

Cultures of Obsolescence PDF

Author: B. Tischleder

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-06-03

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1137463643

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Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode.

Planned Obsolescence

Planned Obsolescence PDF

Author: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0814728960

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Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changeso especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimediaonecessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin.Confronting a change-averse academy, she insists that before we can successfully change the systems through which we disseminate research, scholars must re-evaluate their ways of workingohow they research, write, and reviewowhile administrators must reconsider the purposes of publishing and the role it plays within the university. Springing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick's own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescence explores all of these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescence explores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain vibrant and relevant in the digital future.

Cultures of Obsolescence

Cultures of Obsolescence PDF

Author: B. Tischleder

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-06-03

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 1137463643

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Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode.

Obsolescence

Obsolescence PDF

Author: Daniel M. Abramson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-02-12

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 022631345X

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Things fall apart. But in his innovative, wide-ranging, and well-illustrated book, Daniel Abramson investigates the American definition of what falling apart entails. We build new buildings partly in response to demand, but even more because we believe that existing buildings are slowly becoming obsolete and need to be replaced. Abramson shows that our idea of obsolescence is a product of our tax code, which was shaped by lobbying from building interests who benefit from the idea that buildings depreciate and need to be replaced. The belief in depreciation is not held worldwide which helps explain why preservation movements struggle more in America than elsewhere. Abramson s tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent tropes of sustainability, which struggle to cultivate the idea that the greenest building is the one that already exists."

Made to Break

Made to Break PDF

Author: Giles Slade

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-30

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674043758

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Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.

Trash Culture

Trash Culture PDF

Author: Gillian Pye

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9783039115532

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In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, concerns about the environment and the future of global capitalism have dominated political and social agendas worldwide. The culture of excess underlying these concerns is particularly evident in the issue of trash, which for environmentalists has been a negative category, heavily implicated in the destruction of the natural world. However, in the context of the arts, trash has long been seen as a rich aesthetic resource and, more recently, particularly under the influence of anthropology and archaeology, it has been explored as a form of material culture that articulates modes of identity construction. In the context of such shifting, often ambiguous attitudes to the obsolete and the discarded, this book offers a timely insight into their significance for representations of social and personal identity. The essays in the book build on scholarship in cultural theory, sociology and anthropology that suggests that social and personal experience is embedded in material culture, but they also focus on the significance of trash as an aesthetic resource. The volume illuminates some of the ways in which our relationship to trash has influenced and is influenced by cultural products including art, architecture, literature, film and museum culture.

Prometheanism

Prometheanism PDF

Author: Christopher John Müller

Publisher: Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781783482382

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A translation of the essay 'On Promethean Shame' by Günther Anders with a comprehensive introduction and analysis of his work.

Consequences of planned obsolescence for consumer culture and the promotional self

Consequences of planned obsolescence for consumer culture and the promotional self PDF

Author: Christoph Behrends

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2008-01-09

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 3638889246

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Essay from the year 2004 in the subject Sociology - Communication, grade: 1,7, University of Leicester (Centre for Mass Communication Research), course: Avertising, Culture and Communication, language: English, abstract: During the 20th century, the industrialised countries have developed an extensive amount of obsolescence. It has become clear that nations in the developed world over-consume, while the poor in the developing world pay the price of our increased consumption with their lowered standards of living and increasing environmental damage . When did obsolescence emerge, in how far is it planned, and which consequences does it have for consumer culture and the promotional self on a broader scale? By drawing on numerous examples, this essay explains how advertisements are constructed semiotically and the ideologies they derive from.

Banana Cultures

Banana Cultures PDF

Author: John Soluri

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2021-03-09

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1477322825

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Bananas, the most frequently consumed fresh fruit in the United States, have been linked to Miss Chiquita and Carmen Miranda, "banana republics," and Banana Republic clothing stores—everything from exotic kitsch, to Third World dictatorships, to middle-class fashion. But how did the rise in banana consumption in the United States affect the banana-growing regions of Central America? In this lively, interdisciplinary study, John Soluri integrates agroecology, anthropology, political economy, and history to trace the symbiotic growth of the export banana industry in Honduras and the consumer mass market in the United States. Beginning in the 1870s, when bananas first appeared in the U.S. marketplace, Soluri examines the tensions between the small-scale growers, who dominated the trade in the early years, and the shippers. He then shows how rising demand led to changes in production that resulted in the formation of major agribusinesses, spawned international migrations, and transformed great swaths of the Honduran environment into monocultures susceptible to plant disease epidemics that in turn changed Central American livelihoods. Soluri also looks at labor practices and workers' lives, changing gender roles on the banana plantations, the effects of pesticides on the Honduran environment and people, and the mass marketing of bananas to consumers in the United States. His multifaceted account of a century of banana production and consumption adds an important chapter to the history of Honduras, as well as to the larger history of globalization and its effects on rural peoples, local economies, and biodiversity.

Out of Sync & Out of Work

Out of Sync & Out of Work PDF

Author: Joel Burges

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2018-06-27

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813597119

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Out of Sync & Out of Work explores the representation of obsolescence, particularly of labor, in film and literature during a historical moment in which automation has intensified in capitalist economies. Joel Burges analyzes texts such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wreck-It Ralph, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Iron Council, and examines their “means” of production. Those means include a range of subjects and narrative techniques, including the “residual means” of including classic film stills in a text, the “obstinate means” of depicting machine breaking, the “dated means” of employing the largely defunct technique of stop-motion animation, and the “obsolete” means of celebrating a labor strike. In every case, the novels and films that Burges scrutinizes call on these means to activate the reader’s/viewer’s awareness of historical time. Out of Sync & Out of Work advances its readers’ grasp of the complexities of historical time in contemporary culture, moving the study of temporality forward in film and media studies, literary studies, critical theory, and cultural critique.