en
John Peters

Marvelous Clouds

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When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true-environments are media.Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive.  Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world.A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence-from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google-The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us.  Peters's  book will not only change how we think about media but provide a new appreciation for the day-to-day foundations of life on earth that we so often take for granted.
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  • Michael Bravermanсподели впечатлениепреди 8 години
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    Amazingly well written reference on the subject. Very interesting from a philosophic standpoint.

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  • Michael Bravermanцитирапреди 8 години
    The beautiful Finnish word for world, maailma, in combining two words, earth or land (maa) and atmosphere or air (ilma), catches the right spirit. We cannot return to Dante’s cosmology, but geocentricism, long castigated as the sign of a medieval outlook, might deserve a critical revival. This is my final proposal not only for scholars but for humankind: a ravenous gratitude for the Earth.
  • Michael Bravermanцитирапреди 8 години
    After the shipwreck of our species, which is as inevitable as our own individual deaths, everything in James’s human cloud bank will go, but this blessed earth will live on, and the clouds and sun will continue to radiate for a season, and the beauty that pulses in our senses will continue to pulse to other senses or just to itself, and that will be enough. Knowing that this beauty will persist gives some comfort. When we go, natality might well bring something new forth. There might be long periods of anoxic oceans and arid wastelands, but something will happen and eventually wildflowers might sprout in the ash we left behind. The end of the human species is a comic prospect, not only a tragic one, in the strict sense that comedy involves the regeneration of life. Melville wrote: “Yet there is hope. Time and tide flow wide.”15 Perhaps some other intelligent species will evolve after millions and millions of years, and will do a better job. Time and tide flow wide! As long as we have the clouds, we have hope and fight and love. Knowing that we have their beauty and each other now is too much to take. It is enough and to spare.
  • Michael Bravermanцитирапреди 8 години
    Thoreau, tuning to the same wavelength as Darwin, celebrates apocalyptic destruction as the sign of nature’s recuperative vitality. He is not cele
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