Cultural Software

Cultural Software PDF Author: J. M. Balkin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300084504
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book

Book Description
In this book J. M. Balkin offers a strikingly original theory of cultural evolution, a theory that explains shared understandings, disagreement, and diversity within cultures. Drawing on many fields of study--including anthropology, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology, and law--the author explores how cultures grow and spread, how shared understandings arise, and how people of different cultures can understand and evaluate each other's views. Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural information and know-how--cultural software--in human minds, Balkin says. Individuals embody cultural software and spread it to others through communication and social learning. Ideology, the author contends, is neither a special nor a pathological form of thought but an ordinary product of the evolution of cultural software. Because cultural understanding is a patchwork of older imperfect tools that are continually adapted to solve new problems, human understanding is partly adequate and partly inadequate to the pursuit of justice. Balkin presents numerous examples that illuminate the sources of ideological effects and their contributions to injustice. He also enters the current debate over multiculturalism, applying his theory to problems of mutual understanding between people who hold different worldviews. He argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals and shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible.

Cultural Software

Cultural Software PDF Author: J. M. Balkin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300084504
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book

Book Description
In this book J. M. Balkin offers a strikingly original theory of cultural evolution, a theory that explains shared understandings, disagreement, and diversity within cultures. Drawing on many fields of study--including anthropology, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, linguistics, sociology, political theory, philosophy, social psychology, and law--the author explores how cultures grow and spread, how shared understandings arise, and how people of different cultures can understand and evaluate each other's views. Cultural evolution occurs through the transmission of cultural information and know-how--cultural software--in human minds, Balkin says. Individuals embody cultural software and spread it to others through communication and social learning. Ideology, the author contends, is neither a special nor a pathological form of thought but an ordinary product of the evolution of cultural software. Because cultural understanding is a patchwork of older imperfect tools that are continually adapted to solve new problems, human understanding is partly adequate and partly inadequate to the pursuit of justice. Balkin presents numerous examples that illuminate the sources of ideological effects and their contributions to injustice. He also enters the current debate over multiculturalism, applying his theory to problems of mutual understanding between people who hold different worldviews. He argues that cultural understanding presupposes transcendent ideals and shows how both ideological analysis of others and ideological self-criticism are possible.

Two Bits

Two Bits PDF Author: Christopher M. Kelty
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822342649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book

Book Description
In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software

The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software PDF Author: Benjamin Nicoll
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030250121
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 123

Get Book

Book Description
Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software’ that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its ‘circuits of cultural software’. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.

Software Studies

Software Studies PDF Author: Matthew Fuller
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262062747
Category : Computer programs
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of short expository, critical and speculative texts offers a field guide to the cultural, political, social and aesthetic impact of software. Experts from a range of disciplines each take a key topic in software and the understanding of software, such as algorithms and logical structures.

Software Theory

Software Theory PDF Author: Federica Frabetti
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783481986
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Get Book

Book Description
The cultural and philosophical study of software is crucial, both within and outside of the university, at an international level and across disciplines. Software is increasingly considered the focus of digital media studies because of the perceived need to address the invisibility, ubiquity, and power of digital media. Yet software remains quite obscure to students and scholars in media studies, the social sciences, and the humanities. This unique book engages directly in close readings of technical texts and computer code in order to show how software works and in what sense it can be considered constitutive of culture and even of human thought. Federica Frabetti combines this with an engagement with thinkers such as Bernard Steigler and Jacques Derrida to problematize the very nature of the conceptual system on which software is based and which has shaped its historical evolution. The book argues for a radical demystification of software and digital technologies by addressing the mystery that surrounds its function and that affects our comprehension of its relationship between technology, philosophy, culture, and society.

Cross-cultural Competence

Cross-cultural Competence PDF Author: Sławomir Magala
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415349666
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book

Book Description
Cross-cultural management is a crucial challenge for the development of international business, yet it is often badly understood and poorly implemented. This book provides a fresh look at this complex topic with theory, tool-kits and applications.

Cultural Analytics

Cultural Analytics PDF Author: Lev Manovich
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360632
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book

Book Description
A book at the intersection of data science and media studies, presenting concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. How can we see a billion images? What analytical methods can we bring to bear on the astonishing scale of digital culture--the billions of photographs shared on social media every day, the hundreds of millions of songs created by twenty million musicians on Soundcloud, the content of four billion Pinterest boards? In Cultural Analytics, Lev Manovich presents concepts and methods for computational analysis of cultural data. Drawing on more than a decade of research and projects from his own lab, Manovich offers a gentle, nontechnical introduction to the core ideas of data analytics and discusses the ways that our society uses data and algorithms.

Doing Cultural Studies

Doing Cultural Studies PDF Author: Paul du Gay
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761954026
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book

Book Description
In recent years `culture' has become a central concern in a wide range of fields and disciplines. This book introduces the main substantive and theoretical strands of this `turn to culture' through the medium of a particular case study: that of the Sony Walkman. Using the example of the Walkman, the book indicates how and why cultural practices and institutions have come to play such a crucial part in our lives, and introduces some of the central ideas, concepts and methods of analysis involved in conducting cultural studies.

Transcultural Marketing for Incremental and Radical Innovation

Transcultural Marketing for Incremental and Radical Innovation PDF Author: Christiansen, Bryan
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN: 1466647507
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 588

Get Book

Book Description
As technology continues to drive innovation and impact societies across multiple national boundaries and cultures, new approaches towards marketing products must be created and implemented to be successful in an era of hypercompetition. Transcultural Marketing for Incremental & Radical Innovation provides in depth discussion on tactics for improving existing products while inventing completely new products and product categories. This publication will prove to be helpful for scholars, practitioners, and university students who wish to better understand the importance of marketing products and services across different cultures and multiple languages.

Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production

Creative Tools and the Softwarization of Cultural Production PDF Author: Frédérik Lesage
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031456939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced with digital products and services — a process referred to as softwarization. If ‘being creative’ has developed into one of the paradigmatic architectures of power for framing the contemporary subject, then an essential component of this architecture involves its material and symbolic configuration through tools. From image editors to digital audio workstations, video editors to game engines, these modern tools are used by creatives every day, and mastering these increasingly complex technologies is now a near-compulsory pathway to creative work. Despite their ubiquity in cultural production, few have sought to theorize them in aggregate and with interdisciplinary breadth. By bringing disparate creative and methodological traditions in one volume, this book provides a comprehensive overview of approaches for understanding this complex, emerging, and dynamic field that speaks beyond the disciplinary categories of ‘tool,’ ‘instrument,’ and/or ‘software’. It makes a unique intervention in the fields of cultural production and the cultural and creative industries. ​