Experience on demand

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Alexandra Harney

Journalist Alex Harney shows how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen toll in human misery and environmental damage. Despite a decade of monitoring, foreign businessmen all too often have no idea of the conditions under which goods they buy are made. But change is coming. A generation of Chinese flocked from the rural interior to the coastal factories, in the largest mass migration in human history--but that migration has slowed dramatically. As pollution worsens and infrastructure buckles, and grassroots activism grows, pressures are mounting that will not dissipate without profound change. Managing the violence of that change is China's greatest challenge in the near future, and managing its impact on the world economy may be ours.--From publisher description.

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Margaret Morse

In Virtualities, Margaret Morse focuses on the interactions that people have with machines and images. Morse contends that such interactions, far from being liberating, actually cloak an impoverished public sphere by idealising impersonal relations.

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J. Yellowlees Douglas

"J. Yellowlees Douglas looks at the new light that interactive narratives may shed on theories of reading and interpretation and the possibilities for hypertext novels, World Wide Web-based short stories, and cinematic, interactive narratives on CD-ROM. She confronts questions that are at the center of the current debate: Does an interactive story demand too much from readers? Does the concept of readerly choice destroy the author's vision? Does interactivity turn reading fiction from "play" into "work"--Too much work? Will hypertext fiction overtake the novel as a form of art or entertainment? And what might future interactive books look like?"--Jacket.

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Dennis Walder

"This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread yet often misunderstood condition -- nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries. Often seen as merely escapist, nostalgia also offers solace and self-understanding for those displaced by the larger movements of our time. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of 'Bushman' song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.</P>"--