By Luciano Floridi
We are living in a society that's awash with details, yet few folks fairly comprehend what info is.
In this Very brief creation, one of many world's best specialists at the philosophy of knowledge and on details ethics, Luciano Floridi, bargains an illuminating exploration of knowledge because it pertains to either philosophy and technology. He discusses the roots of the idea that of knowledge in arithmetic and technology, and considers the function of knowledge in numerous fields, together with biology. Floridi additionally discusses thoughts akin to "Infoglut" (too a lot info to procedure) and the emergence of a knowledge society, and he addresses the character of knowledge as a communique technique and its position as a actual phenomenon. maybe extra very important, he explores information's that means and cost, and ends through contemplating the wider social and moral matters in terms of info, together with difficulties surrounding accessibility, privateness, possession, copyright, and open resource. This booklet is helping us comprehend the genuine that means of the concept that and the way it may be used to appreciate our international.
Read or Download Information: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) PDF
Similar social theory books
Craft of Sociology: Epistemological Preliminaries
The paintings of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has emerged, during the last 20 years, as the most large and leading edge our bodies of idea and learn in modern social technological know-how.
The Craft of Sociology, either a textbook and an unique contribution to epistemology in social technology, makes a speciality of a simple challenge of sociological study: the need of an epistemological holiday with the preconstructed gadgets social perform deals to the researcher.
Pierre Bourdieu and his co-authors argue within the epistemological culture of students like Bachelard, Canguilhem, Koyre, a convention that identifies the development of the thing as being the elemental clinical act.
Their approach of discussing the difficulty makes it available not just to teachers and specialists of epistemology, but additionally to complex scholars of social technological know-how, utilizing for representation a variety of texts from some of the social sciences in addition to from philosophy of technology. The booklet comprises an interview with Pierre Bourdieu and an creation by way of the editor to his sociological technique.
We hearken to a cacophony of voices teaching us how one can imagine and consider approximately nature, together with our personal our bodies. the scoop media, flora and fauna documentaries, technology magazines, and environmental NGOs are between these clamouring for our consciousness. yet are we empowered by way of all this information or is our dependence on a number of groups permitting our strategies, sentiments and actions to be unduly ruled via others?
Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior
In an excellent sequence of books approximately social habit, together with The Presentation of Self in lifestyle, Asylums, and Stigma, Erving Goffman has uncovered all that's at stake whilst humans meet nose to nose. Goffman’s paintings, as soon as of the nice highbrow achievements of our time, is an ceaselessly interesting statement on how we enact ourselves via our responses to and our readings of alternative humans.
No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age
The quandary of the revolutionary circulate is so glaring that not anything below a basic rethinking of its easy assumptions is needed. modern progressives now paintings for pro companies more well-off with the interior online game in Washington DC (and capitols during the West), the place they're outmatched and outspent via company pursuits.
- Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
- Regionalism and the Humanities
- Social Theory: a guide to central thinkers
- New Departures in Marxian Theory (Economics as Social Theory)
Extra info for Information: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Example text
I: 275. 62. Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu’s description of the academic and cultural intelligentsia as ‘the dominated fraction of the dominating class’ may be justified in Marxian terms by reference to its activity as a sort of class-wide household servitors of the bourgeoisie. The homology between their position and that of bourgeois housewives might be taken to explain their traditional gendering as feminine by comparison to the masculinity of business and financial managers. It also goes far to explain the relation of cultural to economic capital: it is not their incomes, high in relation to those of most wage earners but mostly not based on capital-ownership, that set cultural producers in the dominant class; it is their class function that is signalled by the award of relatively high income or, when this is not convenient (as with an increasing majority of academics) of status.
The owner of capital, as just observed, is in a position to appropriate that part of the product made with it – translated into money terms – that exceeds the reproduction requirements of the producers. ’22 Alternatively expressed, each capitalist ascribes to the productive virtue of his individual capital the amount he manages to obtain from the surplus labour of employed workers. This appearance is all the more convincing because the amount of profit extracted by each capital does not in fact depend on the surplus production of the workers it employs but is drawn in a complex way from the surplus labour performed for the totality of capitalist employers.
57 The power of this approach is visible in its ability to assimilate social groupings outside the definitions basic to the theory of surplus-value. Surplus-value is appropriated not only by the industrial capitalists in whose enterprises it is produced but also by commercial and financial capitalists and owners of natural resources. Commerce and finance are, Marx explains, necessary aspects of capitalist activity, involving as it does the sale of commodities and the handling of money; just as ‘money capital, commodity capital, and productive capital … do not denote independent varieties of capital’ but ‘simply particular functional forms of industrial capital, which takes all three forms in turn’,58 the specialization of these functions in specific enterprises does not create a new social class, but further divisions (in addition to those due to industrial competition) within the class of exploiters.