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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction:Remembering "Information " -- 2. European Documentation: Paul Otlet and Suzanne Briet -- 3. Information Theory,Cybernetics, and the Discourse of "Man " -- 4. Pierre Lévy and the "Virtual " -- 5. Heidegger and Benjamin: The Metaphysics and Fetish of Information -- 6. Conclusion:"Information " and the Role of Critical Theory -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index -- Author Bio -- Back Cover

'New media' information technologies were recently thought to be so intrinsically different from 'old,' mass media, technologies that fascism would no longer be possible. Through new media information and communication technologies, the political 'mass' was supposedly replaced by the 'crowd' or the 'swarm,' and an old mass media replaced by a new media serving individual 'information needs.' However, extreme right-wing political populism and encroaching fascism today are world-wide phenomena in developed countries, not only despite new media, but partly because of it. How is this possible?

The topic of this paper is the self-imposed limits of Library and Information Science discourse and its institutional discipline. In particular, this paper discusses the disciplinary limits that the field places upon itself, its phobia regarding critical theory and interdisciplinary work (outside of computer science), and why public information, such as 'the news,' is not seen as part of our domain of inquiry. It also engages how persons are understood and constructed as 'information seeking' subjects in this field, including LIS students and researchers. Finally are questions of the overarching disciplining of students and researchers toward 'positive' research in the field, a research that is, in part, often founded upon very shaky 'foundational' theoretical models. Arguably, these questions are linked in the construction of an 'informationalized,' rather docile and uninteresting, political subject, both within and outside of information research in the university, both within and outside of information professionalism, and in the public at large, which should all now be educated to be "information professionals" in a critical manner. All of this is more striking given the amount of verbiage in the past twenty years or so about the presence and the importance of 'the information age.' These questions are specific to Library and Information Science, but they also extend out to information science more generally understood and to questions about the formation of subjectivity in the contemporary university and in U.S. politics. Issues regarding method and critique are central in this paper.

This book readdresses fundamental issues in knowledge management, leading to a new area of study: knowledge processes. McInerney's and Day's superb authors from various disciplines offer new and exciting views on knowledge acquisition, generation, sharing and management in a post-industrial environment. Their contributions discuss problems of knowledge acquisition, handling, and learning from a variety of perspectives

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Introduction -- PART I Intellectual Histories of the Information Age -- Imperial Attractions: Benjamin Franklin's New Experiments of 1751 -- From Heat Engines to Digital Printouts: Machine Models of the Body from the Victorian Era to the Human Genome Project -- The Erasure and Construction of History for the Information Age: Positivism and Its Critics -- PART II Visual Culture, Subjectivity, and the Education of the Senses -- More than the Movies: A History of Somatic Visual Culture through Hale's Tours, imax, and Motion Simulation Rides -- Stereographs and the Construction of a Visual Culture in the United States -- The Convergence of the Pentagon and Hollywood: The Next Generation of Military Training Simulations -- PART III Materiality, Time, and the Reproduction of Sound and Motion -- Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History -- Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, The Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls -- Still/Moving: Digital Imaging and Medical Hermeneutics -- PART IV Digital Aesthetics, Social Texts, and Art Objects -- Bodies of Texts, Bodies of Subjects: Metaphoric Networks in New Media -- Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions -- Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime -- Selected Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index