Archive for February 2018

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[ecrea] New book: Barbara Cassin - Google Me

Wed Feb 07 16:30:43 GMT 2018




*Google Me***

*One-Click Democracy***

/Barbara Cassin, translated by Michael Syrotinski///

"A readable and entertaining, yet serious indictment of informational culture. Cassin, a philosopher and renowned scholar of ancient thought, brings a philosophical perspective to the rise of Google and its impact on a wide range of cultural activities.  Her reflections give us a critical space to consider the cost of our acquiescence to the quantification of culture that lies at the heart of today’s information-driven capitalism. The result is a provocative and potentially transformative contribution to contemporary scholarship on Google and internet culture more generally." - Mark B. N. Hansen

“Google is a champion of cultural democracy, but without culture and without democracy.” In this witty and polemical critique the philosopher Barbara Cassin takes aim at Google and our culture of big data. Enlisting her formidable knowledge of the rhetorical tradition, Cassin demolishes the Google myth of a “good” tech company and its “democracy of clicks,” laying bare the philosophical poverty and political naiveté that underwrites its founding slogans: “Organize the world’s information,” and “Don’t be evil.” For Cassin, this conjunction of globalizing knowledge and moral imperative is frighteningly similar to the way American demagogues justify their own universalizing mission before the world.

While sensitive to the possibilities of technology and to Google’s playful appeal, Cassin shows what is lost when a narrow worship of information becomes dogma, such that research comes to mean data mining and other languages become provincial “flavors” folded into an impoverished Globish, or global English.

*Barbara Cassin* is Director of Research at the CNRS in Paris and President of the Collège International de Philosophie. Her /Dictionary of Untranslatables/ has been adapted into five languages, and her /Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home?/ won the 2015 French Voices Grand Prize. Her most recent book to appear in English is /Heidegger: His Life and His Philosophy/ (coauthored with Alain Badiou).

Fordham University Press | Meaning Systems | October 2017 | 176pp |  9780823278077 | Paperback | £18.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL17GMBC** | Free postage to UK customers


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