Summary
Contents
Subject index
This insightful book is the first to critically examine the ideas of some of the key thinkers of simulation. It addresses the work of Baudrillard, Debord, Virilio and Eco, clarifying their arguments by referring to the intellectual and social worlds each emerged from distilling what is important from their discussions. The book argues for a critical and selective use of the concept of simulation. Like the idea of ideology, simulation is a political theory, but it has also become a deeply pessimistic theory of the end of history and the impossibility of positive change. Through a series of reflections on the meaning of theme parks, warfare and computer modelling, Sean Cubitt demonstrates the strengths and limitations of the simulation thesis
Technology, Information and Reason
Technology, Information and Reason
Canadians in the Global Village
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of mammoth attempts by cultural historians to answer the question, posed with irrefutable violence by World War I: ‘What is civilisation?’ Probably the most negative response came from the Dadaists, artists who had fled to neutral Zurich at the height of the European conflagration: civilisation was over, and it was rubbish anyway. Like the images of Auschwitz and Hiroshima a generation later, the blind, shell-shocked, gassed and mutilated victims of the trenches cast a pall over the claims of culture to lead towards morality, justice, beauty and happiness. If European civilisation was the pinnacle of human achievement, why was an entire generation put to slaughter ...
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