Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real (Leonardo Books)

And this apparently is not a good thing. Romanticism, like the more sober Enlightenment rationalism against which it rebelled, has outlived its usefulness as a way of understanding the world, Coyne argues. And so he spends the duration of the book bombarding both the romantic and the rationalist tendencies in cyberculture with every weapon in the arsenal of 20th-century critical theory: poststructuralism, Freudianism, postmodern pragmatism, Heideggerian phenomenology, surrealism--Coyne uses each in turn to whack away at conventional wisdoms about digital tech. Whether the conventional wisdoms remain standing at the end is an open question, but Coyne's tour of the contemporary intellectual landscape is a tour de force, and never before has digital technology's place in that landscape been mapped so thoroughly. --Julian Dibbell

Product Description
This book explores the spectrum of romantic narrative that pervades the digital age, from McLuhan's utopian vision of social reintegration by electronic communication to claims that cyberspace creates new realities.

Technoromanticism pits itself against a hard-headed rationalism, but its most potent antagonists are contemporary pragmatism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, surrealism, and deconstruction—all of which subvert the romantic legacy and provoke new narratives of computing. Thus the book also serves as an introduction to the application of contemporary theory to information technology, raising issues of representation, space, time, interpretation, identity, and the real. As such, it is a companion to Coyne's Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor (MIT Press, 1995).