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The minjung (people's) movement stood at the forefront of the June 1987 nationwide tide that swept away the military in South Korea and opened up space for relatively democratic politics, a more responsible economy, and new directions in culture. This volume is the first in English to grapple specifically with the nature of a national development that lies at the center of the last three decades of tumult and change in South Korea.
How the valorization of artistic and political dissidence has contributed to the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West. Interest in Chinese contemporary art increased dramatically in the West shortly after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Sparked by political sympathy and the mediatized response to the event, Western curators, critics, and art historians were quick to view the new art as an expression of dissident resistance to the Chinese regime. In this book, Marie Leduc proposes that this attribution of political dissidence is not only the result of latent Cold War perceptions about China, but also indicative of the art world's demand for artistically and politically provocative work—a demand that mirrors the valorization of free expression in liberal democracies. Focusing on nine Chinese artists—Wang Du, Wang Keping, Huang Yong Ping, Yang Jiechang, Chen Zhen, Yan Pei-Ming, Shen Yuan, Ru Xiaofan, and Du Zhenjun—who migrated to Paris in and around 1989, Leduc explores how their work was recognized before and after the Tiananmen Square incident. Drawing on personal interviews with the artists and curators, and through an analysis of important exhibitions, events, reviews, and curatorial texts, she demonstrates how these and other Chinese artists have been celebrated both for their artistic dissidence—their formal innovations and introduction of new media and concepts—and for their political dissidence—how their work challenges political values in both China and the West. As Leduc concludes, the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the West highlights the significance of artistic and political dissidence in the production of contemporary art, and the often-unrecognized relationship between contemporary art and liberal democracy.
The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidents It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union--enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky. His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.
This book tells the story of the dissident imaginary of samizdat activists, the political culture they created, and the pivotal role that culture had in sustaining the resilience of the oppositional movement in Poland between 1976 and 1990. This unlicensed print culture has been seen as one of the most emblematic social worlds of dissent. Since the Cold War, the audacity of harnessing obsolete print technology known as samizdat to break the modern monopoly of information of the party-state has fascinated many, yet this book looks beyond the Cold War frame to reappraise its historical novelty and significance. What made that culture resilient and rewarding, this book argues, was the correspondence between certain set of ideas and media practices: namely, the form of samizdat social media, which both embodied and projected the prefigurative philosophy of political action, asserting that small forms of collective agency can have a transformative effect on public life here and now, and are uniquely capable of achieving a democratic new beginning. This prefigurative vision of the transition from communism had a fundamental impact on the broader oppositional movement. Yet, while both the rise of Solidarity and the breakthrough of 1989 seemed to do justice to that vision, both pivotal moments found samizdat social media activists making history that was not to their liking. Back in the day, their estrangement was overshadowed by the main axis of contention between the society and the state. Foregrounding the internal controversies they protagonized, this book adds nuance to our understanding of the broader legacy of dissent and its relevance for the networked protests of today.
Dissident Voices challenges the view of television as bland purveyor of the status quo, arguing that it has developed a more reflective and critical culture.
This monograph traces the history of the dissident as a transnational phenomenon, exploring Soviet dissidents in Communist Central Europe from the mid-1960s until 1989. It argues that our understanding of the transnational activist would not be what it is today without the input of Central European oppositionists and ties the term to the global emergence and evolution of human rights. The book examines how we define dissidents and explores the association of political resistance to authoritarian regimes, as well as the impact of domestic and international recognition of the dissident figure. Turning to literature to analyse the meaning and impact of the dissident label, the book also incorporates interviews and primary accounts from former activists. Combining a unique theoretical approach with new empirical material, this book will appeal to students and scholars of contemporary history, politics and culture in Central Europe.
A brilliant probe into the political and psychological effects of our changing relationship with social media Former social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive corporate surveillance, and the virtual data mines of Facebook and Google where we spend considerable portions of our free time. In this polemical tour de force, Richard Seymour shows how the digital world is changing the ways we speak, write, and think. Through journalism, psychoanalytic reflection and insights from users, developers, security experts and others, Seymour probes the human side of the machine, asking what we’re getting out of it, and what we’re getting into. Social media held out the promise that we could make our own history–to what extent did we choose the nightmare that it has become?
The German abandonment of nuclear power represents one of the most successful popular revolts against technocratic thinking in modern times—the triumph of a dynamic social movement, encompassing a broad swath of West Germans as well as East German dissident circles, over political, economic, and scientific elites. Taking on Technocracy gives a brisk account of this dramatic historical moment, showing how the popularization of scientific knowledge fostered new understandings of technological risk. Combining analyses of social history, popular culture, social movement theory, and histories of science and technology, it offers a compelling narrative of a key episode in the recent history of popular resistance.