A feminist perspective on the early history of personal computing, revealing how computers were integrated into the most intimate aspects of family life The Intimate Life of Computers shows how the widespread introduction of home computers in the 1980s was purposefully geared toward helping sustain heteronormative middle-class families by shaping relationships between users. Moving beyond the story of male-dominated computer culture, this book emphasizes the neglected history of the influence of women’s culture and feminist critique on the development of personal computing despite women’s underrepresentation in the industry. Proposing the notion of “companionate computing,” Reem Hilu reimagines the spread of computers into American homes as the history of an interpersonal, romantic, and familial medium. She details the integration of computing into family relationships—from helping couples have better sex and offering thoughtful simulations of masculine seduction to animating cute robot companions and giving voice to dolls that could talk to lonely children—underscoring how these computer applications directly responded to the companionate needs of their users as a way to ease growing pressures on home life. The Intimate Life of Computers is a vital contribution to feminist media history, highlighting how the emergence of personal computing dovetailed with changing gender roles and other social and cultural shifts. Eschewing the emphasis on technologies and institutions typically foregrounded in personal-computer histories, Hilu uncovers the surprising ways that domesticity and family life guided the earlier stages of our all-pervasive digital culture.

This is a book about making contact—with yourself, your partner, and everything around you—at the deepest level possible. The basis for this connection is what Dr. Judith Blackstone calls fundamental consciousness—what we all are in our essence. In The Intimate Life, this innovative teacher and psychotherapist shares 17 relational practices from her unique approach to embodied spiritual awakening known as the Realization Process. Offered to help us relate “core to core” with compassion, understanding, and joy, The Intimate Life explores: “Our spirituality flowers as we bring love alive in our lives. In The Intimate Life, Judith Blackstone guides us in how to release resistance to authentic contact and how to realize our inherent oneness with all beings. Her teachings are lucid, powerful, and wise—this book is a gem!” —Tara Brach, PhD, author of Radical Acceptance “With grace and profound insight, Judith Blackstone presents wise guidance on how we can more genuinely connect with and recognize the luminous depth of each other—and the world.” —Marci Shimoff, New York Times bestselling author, Love for No Reason and Happy for No Reason Attuning to Unified Consciousness—how to let go of our conditioned perceptions and behaviors to foster spiritual maturation Overcoming boundary problems—how to embrace the paradox of oneness and separateness Awareness, emotion, and physical contact—the three main pathways of interpersonal connection The spiritual essence of sexuality—spiritual exercises that apply unified consciousness to sexuality to enhance pleasure, liberate the body’s subtle energy, and more To genuinely love other people is one of the central ideals in every spiritual tradition. It’s also one of our greatest challenges. Here is a transformational guide to becoming “lovers of life” and experiencing the full potential of our intimate relationships.

The doctrine of computer life is not congenial to many people. Often they have not thought in any depth about the idea, and it necessarily disturbs their psychological and intellectual frame of reference: it forces a reappraisal of what it is to be alive, what it is to be human, and whether there are profound, yet un expected, implications in the development of modern com puters. There is abundant evidence to suggest that we are wit nessing the emergence of a vast new family of life-forms on earth, organisms that are not based on the familiar metabolic chemistries yet whose manifest 'life credentials' are accumulating year by year. It is a mistake to regard biology as a closed science, with arbitrarily limited categories; and we should agree with Jacob (1974) who observed that 'Contrary to what is imagined, biology is not a unified science'. Biology is essentially concerned with living things, and we should be reluctant to assume that at anyone time our concept and understanding of life are complete and incapable of further refinement. And it seems clear that much of the continuing refinement of biological categories will be stimulated by advances in systems theory, and in particular by those advances that relate to the rapidly expanding world of computing and robotics. We should also remember what Pant in (1968) said in a different context: 'the biological sciences are unrestricted . . . and their investigator must be prepared to follow their problems into any other science whatsoever.

In The World Computer Jonathan Beller forcefully demonstrates that the history of commodification generates information itself. Out of the omnipresent calculus imposed by commodification, information emerges historically as a new money form. Investigating its subsequent financialization of daily life and colonization of semiotics, Beller situates the development of myriad systems for quantifying the value of people, objects, and affects as endemic to racial capitalism and computation. Built on oppression and genocide, capital and its technical result as computation manifest as racial formations, as do the machines and software of social mediation that feed racial capitalism and run on social difference. Algorithms, derived from for-profit management strategies, conscript all forms of expression—language, image, music, communication—into the calculus of capital such that even protest may turn a profit. Computational media function for the purpose of extraction rather than ameliorating global crises, and financialize every expressive act, converting each utterance into a wager. Repairing this ecology of exploitation, Beller contends, requires decolonizing information and money, and the scripting of futures wagered by the cultural legacies and claims of those in struggle.

The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology--and were transformed, in turn, by information machines. The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories--the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture--through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate links between the military projects of the Cold War, the evolution of digital computers, and the origins of cybernetics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. Edwards begins by describing the emergence of a "closed-world discourse" of global surveillance and control through high-technology military power. The Cold War political goal of "containment" led to the SAGE continental air defense system, Rand Corporation studies of nuclear strategy, and the advanced technologies of the Vietnam War. These and other centralized, computerized military command and control projects--for containing world-scale conflicts--helped closed-world discourse dominate Cold War political decisions. Their apotheosis was the Reagan-era plan for a " Star Wars" space-based ballistic missile defense. Edwards then shows how these military projects helped computers become axial metaphors in psychological theory. Analyzing the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory, and the early history of artificial intelligence, he describes the formation of a "cyborg discourse." By constructing both human minds and artificial intelligences as information machines, cyborg discourse assisted in integrating people into the hyper-complex technological systems of the closed world. Finally, Edwards explores the cyborg as political identity in science fiction--from the disembodied, panoptic AI of 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the mechanical robots of Star Wars and the engineered biological androids of Blade Runner--where Information Age culture and subjectivity were both reflected and constructed. Inside Technology series

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a "tool," but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. "Technology," she writes, "catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think." First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture-to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text. Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists, hackers, and personal computer owners-people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think-about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, "When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind." Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms-how this happens, and what it means for all of us-is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self. Book jacket.

Recent discussions of self-realization have devolved into unscientific theories of self-help. However, this vague and often misused concept is connected to many important individual and social problems. As long as its meaning remains unclear, it can be abused for social, political, and commercial malpractices. To combat this issue, this book shares perspectives from scholars of various philosophical traditions. Each chapter takes new steps in asking what the meaning of self-realization is–both in terms of what it means to understand who or what one is, and also in terms of how one can, or should, fulfilll oneself. The conceptual elucidations achieved from both theoretical and practical perspectives allow for a more mature awareness of how to deal with discourses on self-realization and, in any case, can help to demystify the subject.