[ecrea] New book: Barbara Cassin - Google Me

*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


---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------