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In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates. Sampson argues that a biological knowledge of contagion has been universally distributed by way of the rhetoric of fear used in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This awareness is also detectable in concerns over too much connectivity, such as problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson's "virality" is as established as that of the biological meme and microbe but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson interprets contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde's microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze's ontological worldview. According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking--including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers--allows language to overcategorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological.
DIVShows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation./div
Far from being the province of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery, indigenous understanding of contagious disease in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world very often parallels western concepts of germ theory, according to the author. Labeling this 'indigenous contagion theory (ICT),' Green synthesizes the voluminous ethnographic work on tropical diseases and remedies_as well as 20 years of his own studies and interventions on sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS, and traditional healers in southern Africa_to demonstrate how indigenous peoples generally conceive of contagious diseases as having naturalistic causes. His groundbreaking work suggests how western medical practitioners can incorporate ICT to better help native peoples control contagious diseases.
Terrorist attacks seem to mimic other terrorist attacks. Mass shootings appear to mimic previous mass shootings. Financial traders seem to mimic other traders. It is not a novel observation that people often imitate others. Some might even suggest that mimesis is at the core of human interaction. However, understanding such mimesis and its broader implications is no trivial task. Imitation, Contagion, Suggestion sheds important light on the ways in which society is intimately linked to and characterized by mimetic patterns. Taking its starting point in late-nineteenth-century discussions about imitation, contagion, and suggestion, the volume examines a theoretical framework in which mimesis is at the center. The volume investigates some of the key sociological, psychological, and philosophical debates on sociality and individuality that emerged in the wake of the late-nineteenth-century imitation, contagion, and suggestion theorization, and which involved notable thinkers such as Gabriel Tarde, Emile Durkheim, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Furthermore, the volume demonstrates the ways in which important aspects of this theorization have been mobilized throughout the twentieth century and how they may advance present-day analyses of topical issues relating to, e.g. neuroscience, social media, social networks, agent-based modelling, terrorism, virology, financial markets, and affect theory. One of the significant ideas advanced in theories of imitation, contagion, and suggestion is that the individual should be seen not as a sovereign entity, but rather as profoundly externally shaped. In other words, the decisions people make may be unwitting imitations of other people’s decisions. Against this backdrop, the volume presents new avenues for social theory and sociological research that take seriously the suggestion that individuality and the social may be mimetically constituted.
For readers of Plague of Corruption, Thomas S. Cowan, MD, and Sally Fallon Morell ask the question: are there really such things as "viruses"? Or are electro smog, toxic living conditions, and 5G actually to blame for COVID-19? The official explanation for today’s COVID-19 pandemic is a “dangerous, infectious virus.” This is the rationale for isolating a large portion of the world’s population in their homes so as to curb its spread. From face masks to social distancing, from antivirals to vaccines, these measures are predicated on the assumption that tiny viruses can cause serious illness and that such illness is transmissible person-to-person. It was Louis Pasteur who convinced a skeptical medical community that contagious germs cause disease; his “germ theory” now serves as the official explanation for most illness. However, in his private diaries he states unequivocally that in his entire career he was not once able to transfer disease with a pure culture of bacteria (he obviously wasn’t able to purify viruses at that time). He admitted that the whole effort to prove contagion was a failure, leading to his famous death bed confession that “the germ is nothing, the terrain is everything.” While the incidence and death statistics for COVID-19 may not be reliable, there is no question that many people have taken sick with a strange new disease—with odd symptoms like gasping for air and “fizzing” feelings—and hundreds of thousands have died. Many suspect that the cause is not viral but a kind of pollution unique to the modern age—electromagnetic pollution. Today we are surrounded by a jangle of overlapping and jarring frequencies—from power lines to the fridge to the cell phone. It started with the telegraph and progressed to worldwide electricity, then radar, then satellites that disrupt the ionosphere, then ubiquitous Wi-Fi. The most recent addition to this disturbing racket is fifth generation wireless—5G. In The Truth About Contagion: Exploring Theories of How Disease Spreads, bestselling authors Thomas S. Cowan, MD, and Sally Fallon Morell explore the true causes of COVID-19. On September 26, 2019, 5G wireless was turned on in Wuhan, China (and officially launched November 1) with a grid of about ten thousand antennas—more antennas than exist in the whole United States, all concentrated in one city. A spike in cases occurred on February 13, the same week that Wuhan turned on its 5G network for monitoring traffic. Illness has subsequently followed 5G installation in all the major cities in America. Since the dawn of the human race, medicine men and physicians have wondered about the cause of disease, especially what we call “contagions,” numerous people ill with similar symptoms, all at the same time. Does humankind suffer these outbreaks at the hands of an angry god or evil spirit? A disturbance in the atmosphere, a miasma? Do we catch the illness from others or from some outside influence? As the restriction of our freedoms continues, more and more people are wondering whether this is true. Could a packet of RNA fragments, which cannot even be defined as a living organism, cause such havoc? Perhaps something else is involved—something that has upset the balance of nature and made us more susceptible to disease? Perhaps there is no “coronavirus” at all; perhaps, as Pasteur said, “the germ is nothing, the terrain is everything.”
The ideological underpinnings of early modern theories of contagion are dissected in this volume by an integrated team of literary scholars, cultural historians, historians of medicine and art historians. Even today, the spread of disease inspires moralizing discourse and the ostracism of groups thought responsible for contagion; the fear of illness and the desire to make sense of it are demonstrated in the current preoccupation with HIV, SARS, 'mad cow' disease, West Nile virus and avian flu, to cite but a few contemporary examples. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe explores the nature of understanding when humanity is faced with threats to its well-being, if not to its very survival.
An Observer Book of the Year A Times Science Book of the Year A New Statesman Book of the Year A Financial Times Science Book of the Year 'Astonishingly bold' Daily Mail 'It is hard to imagine a more timely book ... much of the modern world will make more sense having read it.' The Times We live in a world that's more interconnected than ever before. Our lives are shaped by outbreaks - of disease, of misinformation, even of violence - that appear, spread and fade away with bewildering speed. To understand them, we need to learn the hidden laws that govern them. From 'superspreaders' who might spark a pandemic or bring down a financial system to the social dynamics that make loneliness catch on, The Rules of Contagion offers compelling insights into human behaviour and explains how we can get better at predicting what happens next. Along the way, Adam Kucharski explores how innovations spread through friendship networks, what links computer viruses with folk stories - and why the most useful predictions aren't necessarily the ones that come true. Now revised and updated with content on Covid-19.
This collection of essays considers what constituted contagion in the minds of early moderns in the absence of modern germ theory. In a wide range of essays focused on early modern drama and the culture of theater, contributors explore how ideas of contagion not only inform representations of the senses (such as smell and touch) and emotions (such as disgust, pity, and shame) but also shape how people understood belief, narrative, and political agency. Epidemic thinking was not limited to medical inquiry or the narrow study of a particular disease. Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker and other early modern writers understood that someone might be infected or transformed by the presence of others, through various kinds of exchange, or if exposed to certain ideas, practices, or environmental conditions. The discourse and concept of contagion provides a lens for understanding early modern theatrical performance, dramatic plots, and theater-going itself.
Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s groundbreaking examination of memetics--the new study of how ideas and beliefs spread. What characterizes a meme is its capacity for displacing rival ideas and beliefs in an evolutionary drama that determines and changes the way people think. Exactly how do ideas spread, and what are the factors that make them genuine thought contagions? Why, for instance, do some beliefs spread throughout society, while others dwindle to extinction? What drives those intensely held beliefs that spawn ideological and political debates such as views on abortion and opinions about sex and sexuality?By drawing on examples from everyday life, Lynch develops a conceptual basis for understanding memetics. Memes evolve by natural selection in a process similar to that of Genes in evolutionary biology. What makes an idea a potent meme is how effectively it out-propagates other ideas. In memetic evolution, the "fittest ideas” are not always the truest or the most helpful, but the ones best at self replication.Thus, crash diets spread not because of lasting benefit, but by alternating episodes of dramatic weight loss and slow regain. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask, "How did you do it?” thereby manipulating them to experiment with the diet and in turn, spread it again. The faster the pounds return, the more often these people enter that disseminating phase, all of which favors outbreaks of the most pathogenic diets. Like a software virus traveling on the Internet or a flu strain passing through a city, thought contagions proliferate by programming for their own propagation. Lynch argues that certain beliefs spread like viruses and evolve like microbes, as mutant strains vie for more adherents and more hosts. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. Readers of this intriguing theory will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, politics, religion, health, and war have succeeded by their "fitness” as thought contagions.