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    Does Writing Have a Future?

    Vilém Flusser (Author), Nancy Ann Roth (Translated by), Mark Poster (Introduction by)

    9780816670239

    Paperback / softback, published 24 February 2011

    208 pages
    20.3 x 12.7 x 1.5 cm, 0.25 kg

    "VilÉm Flusser’s flashes of brilliant insight, his intuitions about the psychology of gadgets and convergences, his deeply well-read and philosophically grounded investigations of wide-ranging consequences of a new literacy, are widely admired and deserve an Anglophone audience. Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future? are of the first rank in the canon of new media studies and digital culture." -Peter Krapp, author of DÉjÀ Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory

    "Perhaps a turn to Flusser will change the disregard for media that so characterizes the cultural theory of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. For Flusser, however flamboyant and polemical his writing at times is, thought deeply about the emergence of electronic media and its implications for not only Western but truly global culture." -Mark Poster, from the Introduction

    In Does Writing Have a Future?, a remarkably perceptive work first published in German in 1987, VilÉm Flusser asks what will happen to thought and communication as written communication gives way, inevitably, to digital expression. In his introduction, Flusser proposes that writing does not, in fact, have a future because everything that is now conveyed in writing-and much that cannot be-can be recorded and transmitted by other means.

    Confirming Flusser’s status as a theorist of new media in the same rank as Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Friedrich Kittler, the balance of this book teases out the nuances of these developments. To find a common denominator among texts and practices that span millennia, Flusser looks back to the earliest forms of writing and forward to the digitization of texts now under way. For Flusser, writing-despite its limitations when compared to digital media-underpins historical consciousness, the concept of progress, and the nature of critical inquiry. While the text as a cultural form may ultimately become superfluous, he argues, the art of writing will not so much disappear but rather evolve into new kinds of thought and expression.

    An Introduction to Vilém Flusser's Into the Universe of Technical Images and Does Writing Have a Future?
    Mark Poster
    Does Writing Have a Future?
    Introduction
    Superscript
    Inscriptions
    Notation
    Letters of the Alphabet
    Texts
    Print
    Instructions
    Spoken Languages
    Poetry
    Ways of Reading
    Deciphering
    Books
    Letters
    Newspapers
    Stationeries
    Desks
    Scripts
    The Digital
    Recoding
    Subscript
    Afterword to the Second Edition
    Translator's Afterword and Acknowledgments
    Nancy Roth
    Translator's Notes
    Index
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