Koivukoski.+After+the+Last+Man

=Koivukoski, Toivo. After the Last Man: Excurses to the Limits of the Technological System. = Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2008. Print.

Summary
 We use technology to help us get a sense of our place in the world. "The mediations outlined within this book map out the hypertext pathways of our global system, making its constitutive relations and underlying thought processes transparent." Using the new hypertext media of the internet makes way for us to figure out our own philosophies on life. "...history understood in a linear, lockstep fashion is over, then the ways of developing concepts should change respectively so that the sorts of retrievals, anticipations, loops, and leaps that characterize nonlinear, networked thinkingare consciously realized in an identity of form and substance."

 This book covers a wide range of topics, broken up into four different sections. The first section is about what we think of technology (is it good, bad? How fragile is technology? Et cetera.) Second section covers the world view upon language, technology, and what it means to be human. The third section goes over more on what it really means to be human, and what machines are (are they savage machines, or merely passive? What is reality?) Lastly, the forth section speaks on what comes after the last man, "the state of mechanical man," "world on automatic," "killing for reality."

Argument
 Forthcoming

Introduction Passages
 Page xii: [...] of human faculties is shifting, with resurgence of mythic attitudes--what are cosmogonies really, as in --arising both as reactionary responses of auto-rejection against technological integration, and as positive-feedback mechanisms of conservative genuflection that serve to essentialize the status quo.

 What we have rather is a new field of potential meanings that stretch the limits of inherited reason because they are arising out of an entirely new phenomena: a man-made cosmos constituted by global systems of exchange and communication.

 [...] of potential meanings, or even to begin naming and numbering its parts for that matter would require an altered mode of expression--a new language form structured via patterns of nodes or episodes, in which each story acts as a discrete field of meaning and microcosmos situated within a complex skien of events [... referring from story to story to yet another story.]

 Here's the question of fundamental ontology--What is the being of being?--takes on a narrative twist [...]

 Page xiii: [...] prevailing model of truth as correspondence has, in effect if not in essence, apparently been reduced to a technical problem solvable by digital technologies with their infinitely reproducible, bifurcated  truths.

 [...] truth in reflection should be considered rather as a mode of direct participation in the phenomenon that is thought, through which the subject of reflection looks back at the reflecting subject.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> [This] text is a sign of what [technology] describes, in that it is a reflection on and of the networked digital communications echnologies that presently encompass the globe.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> [...] here nodes of text are clustered thematically, with links to other related passages suggesting situational narratives. These links act as a kind of running index, collecting, like subjects at the margins for cross-referencing, rather than burying lists of categories and subcategories at the back of the book, safely ordered and out of sight. Here the idea of likeness-between a particular being and the category predicated to it, or between referents and their symbolizations--operates substantively in communicative linkages that mirror a hypertext structure.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Page xiv: In light of an ending of the modern age defined by a faith in progress there is a need for a way of thinking capable of purposive than a technical manual concerned with network maintenance, but at the same time more rational than the mythic grand narratives that are having their renaissance.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> As citizens become estranged from the apparatuses of technocratic decision-making and as technology itself becomes increasingly efficient and invisible in its ongoing operations those systems of human artifacts upon which public order and private satisfactions depend start to seem more and more magical in their operations.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Page xv: [...] not to say that the new prominence of mythical thinking is entirely retrograde. Myth possesses an entrancing sense of speaking directly to the being of beings through an attunement to the world conceived as a discursive web of relations. In myth the word is the foundation for reality, in the senses both of making the world humanly intelligible and, somewhat more magically, in terms of the reconstitution of world views through the periodic retelling of cosmogonic stories.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Page xvi: The stories that frame the mythic worldview also constitute the worlds they call into being, in that the stories act as microcosms of the world at large--first as spoken wor(l)ds, and now in the novel form of digital wor(l)ds.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Such a projection of meaning via symbolism is perhaps the distinctive feature of purely dialectical discourses, which can never really get to the immediate essence of the things themselves, but rather send out strings of representations of meaning, some as objectifying discourses, some as commands, some as hopes and prayers, projected from the self as subject onto a silent world of dispirited beings.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Page xvii: [How] the world is constituted and structured, one could refer to technology, or one could talk in terms of media, that is in terms of the means of communications and the corporate and consensual networks that systematize those means, but then analysis starts on the way to either commentary on shadows on the the wall or, more critically perhaps, to questioning the corporations that mediate the mediations.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <What are the conditions that must pertain in order for us to be able to see the world as we do?> can we come into a free relationship with the word we make, witness, and inhabit. This is not to fetishize technology, but rather to consciously engage with the fundamental conditions of possibility that set the shape of our world and in doing both enframe and instigate the sources of disorder in our psyches and our global politics.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Section 1 Passages
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Section 2 Passages
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Section 3 Passages
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Selected Works Cited
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