Information Please

“Information Please offers a fascinating look at the socio-cultural impact of technology, valuably focused on the materiality of that technology and its concomitant shifts, rather than falling into the proselytising abstractness that characterises so much work on the ‘virtual’.” - Kelly McWilliam, M/C Reviews

“[A]n ambitious merging of cultural theory and new media implications. . . . The questions raised . . . are critical to our understanding of media and the future of our democracy.” - Cindy Royal, Journalism & Mass Communication Educator

“This book is a welcome publication. It proposes new directions for studying the information transference mediated by digital media, and can inspire the reader to look beyond the confinement of current theories, and explore new challenges and significance in the age of digital machines.” - Chong Han, Discourse & Society

“A suitable read for anyone interested in new media, cultural studies, or their interactions, Poster’s Information Please provides a fresh and germane study of the digitalization of humans and their various cultures by new media and technology. . . . [T]hose who have appreciated Poster’s three previous books will find ‘version 4.0’ a worthy and insightful update to the collection.” - Joe Erickson, Technology and Culture

“Against the many pessimistic left intellectuals, Poster’s work is a call for social theorists to focus more on the transforming possibilities and realities of digital media. As such, Poster’s series of essays that make up his latest book offers yet another of his provocative and important interventions in critical theory, one that is bound to advance not only the field of ‘new media’ studies in particular but social theory in general.” - Lincoln Dahlberg, Thesis Eleven

“Poster possesses the rare gift of translating esoteric theoretical debates into lucid, engaging and enjoyable prose. Complex controversies about new media are dissected and clarified with refreshing wit and verve.” - Critical Sociology

“Poster’s discussion is provocative and intellectually stimulating. The study’s findings have important implications for those who teach and conduct research at the juncture of politics and the modern media. Poster’s book should prove particularly useful to graduate students who seek to broaden their understanding of the digital media and its impact on society.” - A.E. Wohlers, Perspectives on Political Science

“Poster’s fascinating book . . . opens up stimulating perspectives for the study of digital culture, with its materiality, its politics and its ‘global but local’ situatedness.” - Federica Frabetti, Culture Machine

“The book is intriguing in the breadth of theories and media it takes on. It is also an important work for the same reason. . . . Information Please should be on the reading list of media studies scholars and pundits, as well as inquisitive interlopers.” - Jonathan Lillie, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

“The real joy in reading Poster is the examples from popular media in order develop, and blend various social theories. scholars do this, but Poster’s particular skill forms, of identities, and of discourses. . . . The strength of this mode of writing is its approachability. . . . Whether or not you agree with Poster’s arguments, he clearly states the need for social theory to engage with media and with networked technologies. And that in itself is a great contribution.” - Matt Ratto, Information Society

”There is no doubt Mark Poster is one of the most important American theorists of the digital information age.” - Diana Bossio, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies

“Engaging, informative, and thoroughly enjoyable, Information Please is a tour de force in its clear articulation of a coherent approach to the spectrum of issues arising from the penetration of information technology into every aspect of human life, from questions of global politics to the construction and protection of identities and selves in the context of digital media.” - Tim Lenoir, Kimberly J. Jenkins Professor of New Technologies and Society, Duke University

“Mark Poster has been one of the foremost scholars of global digital culture over the past decades. Information Please, probably his best and most advanced book to date, continues his project of using contemporary theory to interrogate new media and new media to illustrate and critique certain forms of theory.” - Douglas Kellner, coauthor of The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium