Parlor Press: The Two Virtuals by Alexander Reid

The Two Virtuals

Alexander Reid

Street Date: August 12, 2007

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The Two Virtuals

New Media and Composition

Alexander Reid

Information and Pricing
978-1-60235-022-9 (paperback; $27.00; £15.00); 978-1-60235-023-6 (hardcover; $54.00; £30.00); 978-1-60235-024-3 (Adobe eBook; $14.00; £8.00). 224 pages, with bibliography and index

Available Formats: Paperback | Cloth with Dust Jacket | Adobe eBook on CD

Description
In The Two Virtuals, Alex Reid shows that to understand the relationship between our traditional, humanistic realm of thought, subjectivity, and writing and the emerging virtual space of networked media, we need to recognize the common material space they share. The book investigates this shared space through a study of two, related conceptions of the virtual. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing and networks. The second, less familiar, virtual comes from philosophy. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, and simulation. In drawing the connection between the two virtuals of philosophy and networked media, Reid draws upon research in computers and writing, rhetoric and composition, new media studies, postmodern and critical theory, psychology, economics, anthropology, and robotics.

About the Author
Alex Reid is an associate professor and the director of Professional Writing at the State University of New York College at Cortland. His scholarship focuses on the relationship between writing, pedagogy, and emerging technologies and has appeared in journals such as Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, Theory & Event, and Culture Machine, as well as in collections such as Culture Shock and the Practice of the Profession: Training the Next Wave in Rhetoric and Composition, and Techknowledgies: New Cultural Imaginaries in the Humanities, Arts, & TechnoSciences. He maintains a blog, Digital Digs, on the issues of new media, writing, and higher education at alexreid.typepad.com.

Contents

1 Introduction: The Two Virtuals

Cognition, Consciousness, and Subjectivity
Learning to Live with New Media

2 The Evolution of Writing

Speech and Gesture
The Evolution of Writing

3 Nineteenth-Century New Media

The Discourse Machine Gun1
24 Frames Per Second

4 Cybernetics

Homeostasis
Autopoiesis
AI-AL

5 Into New Media

Simulation
Digital Cinema
From Digital to Analog Virtuality

6 Waking Up in the Machine

Multiplicities and the Becoming of Thought
Cartesian and Topological Spaces
Paranoia and Simulation
Choice and Free Will
Machinic Enslavement
Virtually Autonomous

7 Virtual Composition

Ripping.Contagion.Mushrooms
Mixing
Burning
Electracy: Creative Affects
Rhythm Science
Burning Copyright

8 The Pedagogic Event

Pedagogic Communication
The “Teachable Moment”
Inventing New Media Pedagogy

9 Whatever Discipline

Excellence and Control
Whatever Discipline
Endit

References
Index
About the Author

Submissions . . .

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