The Mode of Information

In this path-breaking work, Mark Poster highlights the nature of
the newly emerging forms of social life, in the current era. The
flexibility of language which the computer allows makes the written
word less certain and less concrete. The result of these changes,
Poster argues, is a new communication experience, an interaction
between humankind and a new kind of reality.

Poster discusses the addictive properties of television and
arcade video games, as well as the surveillance possibilities which
the new communication technologies offer the state. His
wide-ranging analysis incorporates the new language-based theories
of mathematics, philosophy and literature in Wiener, Derrida and
Barthes, among others.

This work is a major new contribution to the debate surrounding
the future of electronically mediated-experiences.

Auteur

Mark Poster is Director of the Film Studies Program and Professor of History at University of California, Irvine.

Résumé
In this path-breaking work, Mark Poster highlights the nature of the newly emerging forms of social life, in the current era. The flexibility of language which the computer allows makes the written word less certain and less concrete. The result of these changes, Poster argues, is a new communication experience, an interaction between humankind and a new kind of reality. Poster discusses the addictive properties of television and arcade video games, as well as the surveillance possibilities which the new communication technologies offer the state. His wide-ranging analysis incorporates the new language-based theories of mathematics, philosophy and literature in Wiener, Derrida and Barthes, among others.

This work is a major new contribution to the debate surrounding the future of electronically mediated-experiences.

Contenu
Introduction: Words Without Things.

1. The Concept of Postindustrial Society.

2. Baudrillard and TV Ads.

3. Foucault and Data Bases.

4. Derrida and Electronic Writing.

5. Lyotard and Computer Science.

Notes.

Index.