The Kiosk Culture: Reconciling The Performance Support Paradox In The Postmodern Age Of Machines

Do you remember the first time you used an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM)? Or a pay-at-the-pump gas station? Or an airline e-ticket kiosk? How did you know what to do? Although you never received any formal instruction in how to interact with the self-service technology, you were likely able to accomplish your task (e.g., withdrawing or depositing money) as successfully as an experienced user. However, not so long ago, to accomplish that same task, you needed the direct mediation of a service professional who had been trained how to use the required complex technology. What has changed? In short, the technology is now able to compensate for the average consumer\u27s lack of experience with the transactional system. The technology itself bridges the performance gap, allowing a novice to accomplish the same task as an experienced professional. This shift to a self-service paradigm is completely changing the dynamics of the consumer relationship with the capitalist enterprise, resulting in what is rapidly becoming the default consumer interface of the postmodern era. The recognition that the entire performance support apparatus now revolves around the end user/consumer rather than the employee represents a tectonic shift in the workforce training industry. What emerges is a homogenized consumer culture enabled by self-service technologies--a kiosk culture. No longer is the ability to interact with complex technology confined to a privileged workforce minority who has access to expensive and time-consuming training. The growth of the kiosk culture is being driven equally by business financial pressures, consumer demand for more efficient transactions, and the improved sophistication of compensatory technology that allows a novice to perform a task with the same competence as an expert. The Kiosk Culture examines all aspects of self-service technology and its ascendancy. Beyond the milieu of business, the kiosk culture is also infiltrating all corners of society, including medicine, athletics, and the arts, forcing us to re-examine our definitions of knowledge, skills, performance, and even humanity. The current ubiquity of self-service technology has already impacted our society and will continue to do so as we ride the rising tide of the kiosk culture

Management: A bibliography for NASA managers (supplement 21)

This bibliography lists 664 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in 1986. Items are selected and grouped according to their usefulness to the manager as manager. Citations are grouped into ten subject categories: human factors and personnel issues; management theory and techniques; industrial management and manufacturing; robotics and expert systems; computers and information management; research and development; economics, costs, and markets; logistics and operations management; reliability and quality control; and legality, legislation, and policy

The Unbearable Lightness of International Relations : Technological Innovations, Creative Destruction and Assemblages

How could one oversee the monumental modern landscape that has been created by over 250 years of continuous technological innovations? Notwithstanding a few students of international relations who have insisted in taking notice, technology has remained an exotic subject matter in International Relations theory (IR). While the interest in technologies is recently growing most IR scholarship remains silent: the fact that we live in a fully integrated and interconnected technological world is absent from textbooks and introductions to IR. Neither exists theoretical approaches and paradigmatic debates that are concerned with technologies; nor a specific intra-disciplinary subfield. Against this background, this book explores how technological innovations could be theorized and integrated into IR theories. Revisiting the inroads of theoretical approaches to technologies, it highlights the lightness of IR scholarship. I argue that the general framework of IR is untenable because it looks at the world as if there were no materials or rather, as if the pervasive presence of artifacts and infrastructures would have no theoretical relevance for conceptualizing and examining world politics. Drawing on ontological and epistemological understandings from anthropology, innovation economics, and science and technology studies, I take issue with the philosophical foundations of the discipline. The notions, concepts and practices, which ultimately sustain and legitimize this lightness, are interrogated. It is shown that the neglect of technological innovation does not merely result from coincidental intellectual moves. It is rather the result of the “Cartesian complex” – the foundational commitment that renders IR a purely social science that deliberately excludes non-humans and hybrid material modes of agency. A radical refashioning is therefore required to the extent to which IR theory aims to accommodate the highly complex and elusive subject matter of technological innovations. This conceptual catharsis does not primarily touch upon epistemological concerns. What is at stake is the limitation of ontological parameters that sustain IR theories. To make sense of the messy technological landscapes, the material agency, and the technologically mediated practices, the prevailing logocentric wisdom needs to be transcended. Against premature metaphysical closure, this book thus contributes to the task of ontological expansion. Firstly, it develops an alternative meta-theoretical foundation coined “explorative realism”. A new meta-theoretical matrix is proposed that renders wider ontological parameters intelligible. Especially, the “double-mixed” zone encourages ontological expansion via notions of heterogeneous agency and process philosophy. This implies that IR scholars avoid treating time, space, knowledge, artificial objects, and built environments as constants but as always croproduced. A coproductive commitment opens up new empirical issues and concerns as well as radically different theoretical puzzles. It also implies overcoming Cartesian dualism, abandoning intentionality-based notions of agency, and forgetting the “level of analysis” assumption. Secondly, this book advances a theoretical toolbox consisting of the interrelated concepts of “assemblages” and “creative destruction”. The former term signifies actor-networks entailing both humans and non-humans. The latter captures the ways in which technological innovations alter or destabilize assemblages across all levels through a process of translation. This theoretical vocabulary also reconceptualizes the meaning of “power”, “authority” with reference to technological innovations. Three open-ended classifications and three models of creative destruction enable the mapping of magnitudes of translations, the changing size and topologies of assemblages and the shifting power and authority. These efforts to theorize technological innovations, then, support empirical research on global transformations and processes of emergence with a set of conceptual tools that allows locating and systematizing cases, puzzles, and scales in relation to assemblages. The study of technological innovations is productive and challenging. It leads to the discovery of novel empirical landscapes and inspires a creative questioning of IR’s foundations. As such, while responding to the stunning absence of theoretical approaches in IR that make sense of technological innovations, this study contributes to the articulation of both a post-international and post-Cartesian version of IR

The Machine as Art/ The Machine as Artist

The articles collected in this volume from the two companion Arts Special Issues, “The Machine as Art (in the 20th Century)” and “The Machine as Artist (in the 21st Century)”, represent a unique scholarly resource: analyses by artists, scientists, and engineers, as well as art historians, covering not only the current (and astounding) rapprochement between art and technology but also the vital post-World War II period that has led up to it; this collection is also distinguished by several of the contributors being prominent individuals within their own fields, or as artists who have actually participated in the still unfolding events with which it is concerne

Digitalization and the Anthropocene

Great claims have been made about the benefits of dematerialization in a digital service economy. However, digitalization has historically increased environmental impacts at local and planetary scales, affecting labor markets, resource use, governance, and power relationships. Here we study the past, present, and future of digitalization through the lens of three interdependent elements of the Anthropocene: (a) planetary boundaries and stability, (b) equity within and between countries, and (c) human agency and governance, mediated via (i) increasing resource efficiency, (ii) accelerating consumption and scale effects, (iii) expanding political and economic control, and (iv) deteriorating social cohesion. While direct environmental impacts matter, the indirect and systemic effects of digitalization are more profoundly reshaping the relationship between humans, technosphere and planet. We develop three scenarios: planetary instability, green but inhumane, and deliberate for the good. We conclude with identifying leverage points that shift human–digital–Earth interactions toward sustainability

The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader

Once confined solely to literature and film, science fiction has emerged to become a firmly established, and wildly popular, television genre over the last half century. The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader provides insight into and analyses of the most important programs in the history of the genre and explores the breadth of science fiction programming. Editor J. P. Telotte and the contributors explain the gradual transformation of the genre from low-budget cinematic knockoffs to an independent and distinct televisual identity. Their essays track the dramatic evolution of early hits such as The Twilight Zone and Star Trek into the science fiction programming of today with its more recent successes such as Lost and Heroes. They highlight the history, narrative approaches, and themes of the genre with an inviting and accessible style. In essays that are as varied as the shows themselves, the contributors address the full scope of the genre. In his essay “The Politics of Star Trek: The Original Series,” M. Keith Booker examines the ways in which Star Trek promoted cultural diversity and commented on the pioneering attitude of the American West. Susan George takes on the refurbished Battlestar Galactica series, examining how the show reframes questions of gender. Other essays explore the very attributes that constitute science fiction television: David Lavery’s essay “The Island’s Greatest Mystery: Is Lost Science Fiction?”calls into question the defining characteristics of the genre. From anime to action, every form of science fiction television is given thoughtful analysis enriched with historical perspective. Placing the genre in a broad context, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader outlines where the genre has been, where it is today, and where it may travel in the future. No longer relegated to the periphery of television, science fiction now commands a viewership vast enough to sustain a cable channel devoted to the genre. J. P. Telotte, professor of literature, communication, and culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the author or editor of numerous books. “This well-edited collection offers a richly detailed and critically penetrating overview of science fiction television, from the plucky adventures of Captain Video to the postmodern paradoxes of The X-Files and Lost. Sixteen essays by major scholars in the field address topics ranging from the politics of Star Trek to the mythic resonances of The Twilight Zone, from the complexities of adapting material from other media to the science-fictionality of television itself. Teachers, students, and fans of SFTV will learn much from this engaging, indispensible volume.”--Rob Latham, coeditor of Science Fiction Studies “Telotte’s volume makes clear how much science fiction is on television (and how much television has been the subject of science fiction). The contributors to this volume demonstrate how much this matters. These are well-written, accessible, and informative essays that cover the subject in depth, from Captain Video to Star Trek; from The X-Files to Firefly.”—Robert Kolker, University of Virginia “Recommended for academic libraries with an interest in communication, media, and culture.” --Rosalind Dayen, Library Journal J. P. Telotte, a leading authority in the field of media studies, has compiled an impressive and qualified list of contributors to provide a synthesis of insight and analysis of the most important programs in the history of the genre’s progress. --Paintsville Herald The huge increase in the number of complex, culturally significant series in the last twenty years makes the genre a vital one for close study. --Joe Milicia, The New York Review of Science Fiction Renowned scholar J. P. Telotte explores how animation has confronted the blank template, and how responses to that confrontation have changed. --thebookstallblog.blogspot.com Provides a provocative glimpse into cultural perspectives of space as a method for understanding both a technological and aesthetic history of animation and the evolution from a modern to postmodern mind-set. --Humanitieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_popular_culture/1007/thumbnail.jp

The New Politics of Patronage: The Arms Trade and Clientelism in the Arab World

In states without robust democratic institutions, public resources are often allocated on the basis of patronage. This distribution of patronage, along with the manipulation of official institutions (such as electoral systems and the judiciary) and the deployment of the coercive arms of the state provided the formula for authoritarian longevity in the Arab World. However, much regional scholarship continues to focus on the process through which patronage is distributed with little reference to how the underlying resources accrue to Arab regimes in the first place. Such studies fail to interrogate the organizational and financial interests of the external institutions (such as oil markets and aid organizations) that mediate this transfer of resources, and how those interests shape methods and patterns of resource distribution within Arab States. This paper is an attempt to identify some of these institutions and patterns by focusing on the array of patronage resources made available through the arms purchases executed by regional governments. The specific class of resources examined here is reciprocal investment contracts that U.S. defense firms negotiate with procuring country governments in order to facilitate arms sales, known in industry parlance as `defense offsets.' Procuring states design their own offset policies, including the amount of investment that foreign arms manufacturers are required to make and the domestic enterprises where those funds must be allocated. The procuring state's discretion over the process allows us to draw some conclusions about how these governments distribute offset investment to strengthen incumbents' patronage-based support networks. This analysis also reveals how U.S. defense firms are able to influence the negotiation process in order to secure their own financial benefits. By examining how defense firms and their customers in the Middle East collude to structure weapons contracts in order to generate offset agreements that are mutually beneficial, we gain a better understanding of how patronage politics operates in the contemporary regional context. We are likewise alerted to the subtle ways in which influential external actors can insinuate their own interests into the process, and how the interactions between these groups create ever-evolving new opportunities for patronage politics